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Liver and Bacon
re- Prepare as for broiled liver; sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge with flour. Cook the bacon until crisp and brown; move it and fry the liver slowly in the fat. Cook until thoroughly done but not dried, and make a brown sauce, using the fat in the pan. Serve with the bacon.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you have already read the broiled liver entry a few pages earlier. The two things it leaves to you are the cut of liver and the sauce, and both decide whether this is good or grim.
- "Prepare as for broiled liver"In books of this period that usually means liver sliced about half an inch thick, the outer membrane peeled off and any large tubes cut away. Period books often direct pouring boiling water over the slices to draw out blood; a soak in milk to soften the flavour is a later practice, but still worth doing with beef liver.
- Which liverCalf's liver is milder and finer grained and needs the least cooking. Beef liver is cheaper, coarser and much stronger, and is the likelier intention in an everyday household book, though the recipe does not say. Pork liver is stronger again and not a good substitute here.
- "Thoroughly done but not dried"This is the hinge. Liver toughens and turns grey and mealy the moment it is overcooked; half-inch slices want only a few minutes a side over medium heat, until browned outside and just cooked through. "Fry slowly" in the original means moderate heat, not long cooking.
- FlouringDredge just before the liver hits the pan. If the floured slices sit, the flour draws moisture, goes pasty and will not brown.
- The bacon fatPeriod bacon was fattier and saltier than most supermarket bacon and rendered more fat. If your pan is dry after the bacon comes out, add a spoonful of butter or oil rather than crowding the liver into a bare pan. Hold back on salting until you taste, for the same reason.
- The "brown sauce"This is pan gravy, not the classic espagnole. Pour off all but about two tablespoons of fat, stir in two tablespoons of flour, cook until it smells nutty and goes the colour of a hazelnut shell, then whisk in a cup of beef stock or half stock and half milk. Season and simmer two or three minutes.
- OnionsNot in the text, but a pan of sliced onions cooked soft in the bacon fat before the liver goes in is a common pairing with liver and improves the gravy considerably.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a working guide, about a pound and a half of liver with eight to ten rashers will serve four.
Liver and bacon belongs to the family of "variety meat" dishes that carried an outsized share of everyday cooking before refrigeration and centralised packing changed how butchers sold. Organ meats spoiled fastest, so they were sold cheap and eaten the day they were bought, which is why cookbooks of the period give them a whole run of entries — broiled, fried, braised, larded, made into loaf. The pairing with bacon is practical as much as traditional: liver is extremely lean and has almost no fat of its own to fry in, so the bacon supplies both the cooking medium and the salt and smoke that offset liver's mineral edge. Mrs. Fryer's book was aimed at the household cook working through a repertoire methodically, which is why this entry can begin by pointing back at the broiled liver page rather than repeating itself.