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Chickens' Livers with Madeira Sauce
Clean and separate livers, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter. Brown two tablespoons butter, add two and one-half tablespoons flour, and when well browned add gradually one cup Brown Stock; then add two tablespoons Madeira wine, and reheat livers in sauce.
A plain brown-sauce sauté that depends almost entirely on not overcooking the livers. Farmer gives no quantity for the livers themselves; the sauce as written (1 cup stock) will coat about 1 lb, serving three or four.
- The hinge: brief cookingChicken livers take only a few minutes per side in hot butter, and modern cooks often stop while the center is still faintly rosy; note that poultry livers frequently carry campylobacter and current food-safety guidance is to cook them through. "Reheat livers in sauce" means exactly that — a minute over low heat, not a simmer. Held longer they turn grainy and chalky.
- Dry them firstThe flour dredge will slide off wet livers and thicken the pan instead of browning. Pat them dry, dredge just before they go in, and cook in batches so the butter stays hot enough to sear.
- Cleaning and separatingFarmer's "clean" means pulling apart the two lobes and cutting away any green-tinged spot (bile stain, bitter) along with connective tissue and fat.
- Brown StockIn this book that is a long-simmered stock from browned beef shin and bones — closer to a modern dark beef or veal stock than to canned broth. Unsalted beef stock is the nearest substitute; if using a commercial one, salt the sauce only at the end.
- The brown rouxTwo tablespoons butter to two and a half tablespoons flour, cooked until genuinely nut-brown, gives a thinner, deeper-flavored sauce than a pale roux of the same weight; browning destroys some thickening power, which may account for the slightly increased flour here. Keep the heat moderate and stir; scorched flour is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- MadeiraUse a dry to medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho) or, failing that, dry sherry. Add it off the direct boil at the end as written; long cooking flattens it. "Cooking Madeira" sold salted is not worth using.
- ServingIntended as a hot entrée or luncheon dish on toast points, in a pastry shell, or with rice. Season the finished sauce assertively — livers and brown roux both need salt and a good deal of pepper.
Chicken livers came to the American table largely as a by-product of dressing poultry at home, where the liver, heart and gizzard went into gravy, stuffing or a small separate dish like this one. Fannie Farmer's treatment follows nineteenth-century French method as taught in cooking schools — a brown roux slackened with brown stock, finished with fortified wine, a domestic cousin of sauce madère. Madeira held a particular place in American cooking and drinking from the colonial period onward, since the island was a routine stop on Atlantic trade routes and the wine survived long sea voyages and warm cellars better than most; by the end of the century it was among the wines commonly called for in brown sauces, alongside sherry. The recipe's brevity, and its silence on how many livers to use, is unusual in a book otherwise known for exact measurement.