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Liver and Bacon
Have liver cut in thin slices; wash, drain, dry and roll in flour. Put bacon thinly sliced into very hot frying pan; turn until brown and transfer to hot platter. Fry liver quickly in the hot bacon drippings, turning often. When done put on platter with bacon. Pour off all but 1 or 2 tablespoons fat, add 1 to 2 tablespoons flour, and stir until brown. Add hot water gradually to make smooth gravy, season and boil 1 minute. Pour over liver and bacon or serve separately.
A short recipe that assumes you know what "when done" means for liver. It does not, and that is the whole dish.
- Which liverThe book does not specify. Calf's liver is milder and cooks faster than beef liver; beef liver is often given a soak in milk beforehand, a traditional step said to soften its strong flavour.
- Thin means thinAsk for slices between 1/4 and 3/8 inch. Thicker slices cannot be cooked through quickly, and slow-cooked liver turns grainy and dry.
- The hinge: 2 to 3 minutes total"Fry liver quickly, turning often" is the entire technique. About 60 to 90 seconds a side over medium-high heat, pulled while the centre is still faintly pink. Liver cooked to uniform grey-brown is the reason people say they dislike it.
- Skip the washingRinsing meat under the tap spreads bacterial spray around the sink. Pat the slices dry with paper towel instead, then flour them. Dry surfaces are what let the flour brown rather than gum.
- Flour just before fryingFlour drawn onto wet liver goes pasty within a couple of minutes. Dredge each slice as it goes into the pan, not all of them in advance.
- Bacon fat quantityThe recipe assumes enough rendered fat to pour some off. If your bacon is lean and yields little, add a spoonful of butter or oil to have enough to fry in, and a little more before making the gravy.
- The gravyOne to two tablespoons of flour will take roughly a cup of hot water. Add it in stages, stirring smooth each time, and the one-minute boil is what cooks out the raw flour taste. Season with salt and black pepper.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Figuring roughly 5 to 6 oz of liver and two rashers per person, a pound of liver with 6 to 8 slices of bacon makes about three servings.
Liver and bacon belongs to a long tradition of pairing offal with cured pork fat, in which the bacon supplies both the cooking medium and the salt that offal wants. Liver is the most perishable part of a carcass and the first to be eaten, so it was cheap, ubiquitous and cooked plainly; a recipe like this needed no persuasion to earn its place in a general household cookbook. The particular structure here, meat fried and removed, flour browned in the drippings, water added to make a pan gravy, is the standard American approach of the era, applied to a wide range of meats. Liver's later fall from favour is often said to have less to do with taste than with rising incomes and the eclipse of the neighbourhood butcher, who was the one person likely to have it fresh enough to cook this way, though this remains speculation.