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Chickens' Livers with Bacon
Clean livers and cut each liver in six pieces. Wrap a thin slice of bacon around each piece and fasten with a small skewer. Put in a broiler, place over a dripping-pan, and bake in a hot oven until bacon is crisp, turning once during cooking.
Sautéd Chickens' Livers Cut one slice bacon in small pieces and cook five minutes with two tablespoons butter. Remove bacon, add one finely chopped shallot, and fry two minutes; then add six chickens' livers cleaned and separated, and cook two minutes. Add two tablespoons flour, one cup Brown Stock, one teaspoon lemon juice, and one-fourth cup sliced mushrooms. Cook two minutes, turn into a serving dish, and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
Two related preparations: bacon-wrapped liver roasted in a hot oven, and a quick sauté finished with a flour-thickened brown sauce. Both are fast, and the timings are the part that needs attention.
- "Broiler" means a rackIn 1896 a broiler was a hinged wire grid, not a setting on the oven. Set the wrapped pieces on a wire rack over a rimmed sheet pan so fat drips clear and the bacon crisps on all sides.
- Hot ovenRead "hot oven" as roughly 400–450F. At that heat thin bacon crisps in about 12–15 minutes, turning once.
- Small skewersWooden toothpicks do the job. Soak them briefly so they do not scorch, and count them before serving.
- Doneness matters herePoultry liver commonly carries Campylobacter, and the pathogen survives in a centre that is still bloody. Cook to 165F throughout; the liver should be firm and uniformly brown-grey, not glossy red inside. The two-minute sauté in the second recipe is a first sear only — the pieces finish cooking in the sauce during the final two minutes, and if they are large, give them longer.
- Cleaning the livers"Clean" means separating the two lobes, cutting away connective tissue and any green-stained patch where bile has leaked. That green bitterness will ruin the whole dish.
- Brown StockThe book's own recipe is a long-simmered beef stock made with bone. A good unsalted beef stock reduced by a third stands in; season at the end, since flour-thickened sauces concentrate salt.
- Shallot and flourTwo tablespoons flour to one cup stock gives a thick, gravy-like coating rather than a pour-over sauce. For something looser, use one tablespoon, or add stock a little at a time until it naps the spoon.
- YieldThe sauté as written, using six livers, serves two as a main course or four on toast as a savoury. The bacon-wrapped version scales to whatever you have.
Liver and bacon is an old British pairing that came into American cookbooks as an economical way to use what the poultry-dresser left over: livers were sold cheap or given away with the bird, and a household that bought whole chickens accumulated them. The period's habit was to treat them as a light supper dish or a savoury course served on toast. The sautéed version, with its shallot, brown stock, mushrooms and lemon, is essentially a small hotel-kitchen sauce reduced to domestic scale — the Boston Cooking School's characteristic move of teaching restaurant method with a grocer's ingredients. The wrapped-and-skewered version belongs to the same family as the devils and rumaki-style skewers that turn up in later cocktail-party cooking.