Braised Liver
Skewer, tie in shape, and lard upper side of calf's liver. Place in deep pan, with trimmings from lardoons; surround with one-fourth cup each, carrot, onion, and celery, cut in dice; one-fourth teaspoon peppercorns, two cloves, bit of bay leaf, and two cups Brown Stock or water. Cover closely and bake slowly two hours, uncovering the last twenty minutes. Remove from pan, strain liquor, and use liquor for the making of a brown sauce with one and one-half tablespoons butter and two tablespoons flour. Pour sauce around liver for serving.
Calf's Liver, Stuffed and Larded Make a deep cut nearly the entire length of liver, beginning at thick end, thus making a pouch for stuffing. Fill pouch. Skewer liver and lard upper side. Put liver in baking pan, pour around two cups Brown Sauce, made of one tablespoon each butter and flour, and two cups Brown Stock, salt, and pepper. Bake one and one-fourth hours, basting every twelve minutes with sauce in pan. Remove to serving dish, strain sauce around liver, and garnish with Glazed or French Fried Onions (see p. 296).
Stuffing. Mix one-half pound chopped cooked cold ham, one-half cup stale bread crumbs, one-half small onion finely chopped, and one tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Moisten with Brown Sauce; then add one beaten egg, and season with salt and pepper.
Two related preparations for a whole calf's liver, both relying on larding to compensate for a very lean cut. The larding is the part that matters most: without added fat, two hours of braising leaves liver dry and grainy.
- Larding and lardoonsLardoons are strips of firm salt pork or fresh pork fatback threaded through the meat with a larding needle. Without a needle, lay strips of blanched salt pork or thick bacon over the top and tie them on; the "trimmings from lardoons" are simply the fat scraps left over, thrown into the pan for flavour.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven is usually taken as somewhere around 300F, though the recipe gives no temperature and none is stated here; the point is a gentle covered braise. Covered and low, the liquid will barely tremble.
- The two-hour questionA whole calf's liver braised two hours will be firm and mealy by modern taste; the book's era wanted liver cooked through and sliceable. A whole liver of 2 to 3 lb will be cooked through well before that, and 160F internal is the usual target. Judge by a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Calf's liverVeal liver, milder and paler than beef liver, and now a special order from a butcher rather than a case item. A whole one runs 2 to 3 lb. Beef liver can be substituted but is stronger and coarser; soaking it an hour in milk, then draining, tames it.
- Brown Stock and Brown SauceBrown Stock is the book's roasted-bone beef stock; unsalted commercial beef stock stands in. The finishing sauce here is a plain brown roux: 1 1/2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour cooked to a nut colour, then the strained braising liquor whisked in.
- Vegetables and aromaticsOne-fourth cup each of carrot, onion and celery in small dice, with peppercorns, two cloves and a scrap of bay, is a modest mirepoix for a pan this size. It is strained out and discarded, so rough dice is fine.
- Uncovering at the endThe last twenty minutes off the lid is there to colour the larded top and reduce the liquor. Watch it, since a shallow pan can go dry in that time.
- The stuffed versionCut the pouch with a long thin blade from the thick end and stop short of the tip, or the filling escapes. The stuffing is bound with a raw egg but is fully baked inside the liver, so no special handling is needed beyond keeping the mixture cold until it goes in.
- YieldNeither version is portioned. A 2 to 3 lb liver, sliced across, serves six to eight; the stuffed one carves into neat rounds with the ham filling in the centre.
Larding is the signature technique of nineteenth-century American and French cookery for lean meats, and calf's liver was one of its natural subjects: almost fatless, prone to drying, and cheap enough that a cook could afford to spend salt pork on it. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats liver as a dish for company rather than a scrap meal, dressing it with a brown sauce, a ham stuffing and glazed or French fried onions. The larding needle itself is generally said to have been standard equipment in a well-outfitted kitchen of the period, and had largely disappeared from American homes by the mid-twentieth century, along with the appetite for whole braised liver; organ meats are usually said to have fallen out of favour in the United States in the post-war decades as beef muscle cuts grew cheaper and more plentiful.