Liver and Bacon
Prepare as for Broiled Liver, cut in pieces for serving, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and fry in bacon fat. Serve with bacon.
Bacon I Place strips of thinly cut bacon on board, and with a broadbladed knife make strips as thin as possible. Put in hot frying-pan and cook until bacon is crisp and brown, occasionally pouring off fat from pan, turning frequently. Drain on brown paper.
Two recipes run together here: the liver, and the bacon to go with it. The cross-reference to Broiled Liver hides the step that matters most.
- What "prepare as for Broiled Liver" meansThat instruction points back to the earlier recipe, which in outline is: pour boiling water over the liver, let it stand, drain, then peel off the outer membrane and cut out the tough tubes and veins before slicing thin. Check that recipe for the exact standing time and thickness. Skipping the membrane leaves the slices curling and chewy in the pan.
- Which liverCalf's liver — pale, mild and tender — was a common choice for frying in this period. Mature beef liver is darker, stronger and coarser; if that is what you have, a soak in milk for half an hour tames it. Lamb's liver is a good stand-in.
- The hinge: do not overcookLiver goes from tender to grey and grainy very quickly. Thin slices need roughly two minutes a side over fairly brisk heat, until the surface is browned and the centre just faintly rosy.
- The flour dredgeDredge immediately before frying, not in advance. Flour left sitting on wet liver turns to paste and the crust will not brown. Shake off the surplus so the fat stays clean.
- Shaving the baconThe instruction to lay bacon on a board and cut it thinner with a broad-bladed knife belongs to an era of slab bacon cut at home. Commercially sliced bacon is already thin enough; ignore this step. Streaky bacon crisps best.
- Pouring off the fatRendered fat is drained off as it accumulates so the bacon fries rather than swims — a shallow pan of fat steams the strips. Keep the fat: it is the frying medium for the liver, and a couple of tablespoons in the pan is plenty.
- Brown paperUnbleached grocery paper was the standard drain. Use paper towels or a wire rack over a tray.
- Yield and servingAs a rough guide, about a pound of liver and half a pound of bacon will serve four. Fry the bacon first, hold it warm, then cook the liver in its fat and serve at once — liver stiffens as it stands. Fried onions or a splash of vinegar deglazed into the pan are common companions.
Liver and bacon is a thrift dish of long standing: the salt fat supplies what the lean offal lacks, and the offal supplies what was cheapest at the butcher's block. Liver was widely recommended in the period as strengthening food for the anaemic and convalescent, a belief consistent with its high iron and vitamin A content. The terse cross-reference style here is characteristic of the book, which builds a repertoire out of a handful of base preparations and then varies them; Broiled Liver comes first, and the fried versions hang off it. The accompanying bacon method, with its shaving on a board and its brown paper, is a reminder that bacon of this period commonly arrived as a slab from a barrel or a grocer's counter rather than in a printed vacuum pack.