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Calf's Liver with Cream Sauce
Pour boiling water over the slices of liver and let stand five minutes to draw out the blood. Drain, wipe, remove all skin, white veins and membranes, and dust with flour. Fry several slices of breakfast bacon until crisp; remove them and pour off the fat into a clean frying pan, leaving the salt and sediment. Reheat the fat; put in enough liver to cover the bottom of the pan; cook until done, testing one piece by cutting it with a knife to see whether all pink color is gone from the inside. Arrange the pieces on a hot platter, surround them with the bacon and cover with a cream sauce made in the pan. Pour off all the fat but one tablespoon; add a tablespoon of flour; cook thoroughly and add the cream or milk.
A straightforward pan-fried liver with bacon and a pan gravy. The original assumes you know how much milk goes into a one-tablespoon roux and how thick to cut the liver, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: don't cook it to grayThe instruction to cook until "all pink color is gone" reflects period caution and will give you dry, grainy liver. Calf's liver is generally considered at its best pulled when the center is still faintly rosy, roughly 2 minutes per side on slices half an inch thick. It carries no trichinosis risk, but searing the exterior does not guarantee the inside is safe, so cook it through if you want the assurance of the original.
- Slice thicknessAim for 3/8 to 1/2 inch. Thicker pieces cannot cook through before the outside toughens; paper-thin slices overcook before they color.
- The boiling-water soakScalding to "draw out the blood" turns up in period cookbooks and may mellow the flavor slightly, but it also partly cooks the surface and makes the flour coating slide. A 20-minute soak in cold milk, then drained and patted dry, is the usual modern substitute. Removing the outer membrane and the tough white veins is the part that genuinely matters.
- "Breakfast bacon"Ordinary thin-sliced streaky bacon. Four or five slices give both the garnish and enough rendered fat for the pan. Pouring the fat off into a clean pan, as directed, leaves behind the salt and scorched bits that would otherwise darken the sauce.
- Cream sauce proportionsOne tablespoon fat and one tablespoon flour will take about 1 cup of milk or light cream for a pourable sauce, less if you want it thick. Cook the flour in the fat a full minute before adding liquid, and season with salt and pepper, which the original leaves unmentioned.
- Pan heatMedium-high. Bacon fat smokes readily, and liver dusted with flour scorches if the pan is left on high while you work through batches. Cook in batches rather than crowding, or the slices steam.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of liver, roughly 4 slices, serves 3 to 4. Calf's liver often has to be ordered from a butcher; beef liver is the common substitute and is stronger and coarser, and benefits more from the milk soak.
Liver and bacon is one of the oldest partnerships in English and American cookery, the bacon supplying both fat for frying and salt against liver's minerality, and calf's liver was long the aristocrat of the group, milder and finer-grained than beef or pork and priced accordingly. The cream sauce built in the pan suggests this is a genteel version rather than the plain fried liver and onions of a working kitchen, and liver was in any case still an unremarkable weeknight purchase.