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Chickens' Livers with Curry
Clean and separate livers. Dip in seasoned crumbs, egg, and crumbs, and sauté in butter. Remove livers, and to fat in pan add two tablespoons butter, one-half tablespoon finely chopped onion, and cook five minutes. Add two tablespoons flour mixed with one-half teaspoon curry powder and one cup stock. Strain sauce over livers, and serve around livers Rice Timbales.
A late-Victorian chafing-dish style dish: breaded chicken livers in a quick curry-flavoured velouté, ringed with moulded rice. The original gives no quantity of livers and no cooking times beyond the onion, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- Quantity and yieldThe sauce as written (2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup stock) is a standard cup of thickened sauce and will coat about 1 lb of livers. That serves four as a lunch or supper dish, or six as a first course.
- The hinge: do not overcook the liversChicken livers go grainy and chalky within a minute of passing doneness. Sauté in hot butter 2-3 minutes a side until browned outside and still faintly pink at the centre, then hold them while you build the sauce. They finish under the hot sauce.
- "Clean and separate"Means pulling the two lobes apart at the connecting tissue and cutting away any green-tinged bile-stained spot, which is bitter, plus the fibrous strands and fat. Modern supermarket livers usually need only a quick trim and a pat dry.
- Crumbs, egg, and crumbsFannie Farmer's standard breading order: dry crumbs first, then beaten egg (thinned with a tablespoon of water), then crumbs again. Livers are wet, and the first coat of crumbs gives the egg something to grip. Dry crumbs, not fresh, or the coating steams instead of crisping.
- "Seasoned" crumbsThe book assumes salt and pepper. Reckon on 1/2 tsp salt and a few grinds of pepper per cup of crumbs.
- Curry powderThe tinned curry powders sold in America at this period were generally mild and turmeric-heavy. A half teaspoon in a cup of sauce is a suggestion rather than a flavour; with a modern blend you can go to a full teaspoon, and it repays being cooked in the butter with the onion for a minute before the flour goes in.
- StockChicken or veal stock. If it is unsalted, the sauce will need seasoning after it thickens; simmer it two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- StrainingStraining removes the onion and any browned crumbs shed in the pan, giving a smooth sauce. Skip it if you would rather keep the onion, but then chop it very fine.
- Rice TimbalesCooked rice pressed into small buttered moulds or ramekins and turned out. Any well-seasoned rice packed into a teacup and unmoulded onto the plate does the same job.
Curry powder was a fixture of respectable American and British cooking long before curry itself was understood in any regional sense: a single sweet, turmeric-forward tinned blend used simply as a seasoning, and often applied to leftovers, shellfish, and small offal. Chicken livers fit that pattern exactly. They came in ones and twos with each bird, were too good to waste and too few to be a joint, so they were kept for savoury little dishes, chafing-dish suppers and garnishes. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is full of this thrift, and the ring of moulded rice timbales is the period's answer to the problem of making a cupful of something look like a course.