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Liver and Bacon Sandwiches
½ cup chopped bacon
I/2 cup mashed liver
¼ cup cream
Salt and pepper
Mix chopped bacon and mashed liver, season with pepper and salt, and mix with cream. Decorate the plate with a border of lemon slices and hard-boiled eggs cut into halves lengthwise, with a sprig of cress or parsley on each.
A sandwich filling rather than a finished sandwich — the original assumes you know to spread it on thin bread and trim the crusts. The one thing the text leaves unstated is that both meats must already be cooked.
- Both meats are cooked firstNothing here goes near heat, so the bacon must be fried crisp and drained, and the liver must be cooked through before mashing — calf's, lamb's or chicken liver braised or sautéed to 160F, then cooled. Raw or pink liver in a cold spread is not safe.
- Which liverA book of this kind might well mean calf's liver, but chicken livers are easier to find, milder, and mash to a smoother paste. Something in the region of 1/2 lb of trimmed raw liver should give the half cup called for; check as you go.
- Chopped baconHalf a cup of cooked, crumbled bacon is roughly 8 rashers. Chop it fine — coarse pieces tear thin bread when you spread the filling.
- CreamRead this as a rich cream, heavy or whipping, though books of the period also used plain "cream" for thinner grades. A quarter cup will give a soft, spreadable paste; add it gradually, since cooked liver varies a great deal in how much it absorbs.
- SeasoningLiver and cream both flatten under refrigeration, so salt and pepper more assertively than seems right while warm. A little grated onion, mustard or lemon juice would not be out of keeping.
- BreadThin-cut white sandwich bread, crusts removed, cut into triangles or fingers. Butter the bread lightly first so the cream does not soak in.
- Yield and keepingMakes something over a cup of filling, enough for 8 to 10 small tea sandwiches. Cooked liver spoils faster than most cooked meat; keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within a day.
- The garnishThe lemon, halved hard-boiled eggs and cress are plate decoration for a served platter, not part of the filling — the sort of instruction that tells you these sandwiches were meant to be looked at before they were eaten.
Butterick was a paper-pattern company, and its household books were aimed at broadly the same reader as its dress patterns: a woman running a house on a budget who still wanted things to look correct. A filling built from two cheap things at the butcher's — liver and bacon — is finished with a garnish of lemon and eggs elaborate enough for a tea table. Liver paste sandwiches belong to the broad early-twentieth-century fashion for potted and minced meat fillings, the same impulse that produced deviled ham and chicken paste, all of them ways of making a small quantity of meat cover a large plate of bread. Liver also carried a long-standing reputation as a strengthening food, which gave such recipes a second selling point beyond thrift.