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Calf's Liver and Bacon
Cut the bacon in very thin slices, place them in a hot frying-pan, and turn constantly until all are crisp; then take them up and keep hot. Cut the liver one-fourth of an inch thick, wash it in cold water, and dry on a napkin. Place the frying-pan where the heat will not be so great as when the bacon was cooked, and fry the liver ten minutes, turning it frequently. Place the liver in the center of the platter, with the bacon around it as a garnish. Stir a tablespoon of flour into the hot fat in the pan and stir until brown. Set the pan back and gradually add enough boiling water to make the gravy. Season with pepper and salt, and pour the gravy over the liver and bacon. Slow cooking spoils bacon, and rapid cooking hardens and toughens liver.
A straightforward pan supper whose only real difficulty is the timing, and the recipe states the governing rule in its last sentence.
- Read the last line firstBacon wants steady, fairly brisk heat to crisp; liver wants gentler heat so the proteins do not seize. Moving the pan off the hottest spot between the two stages is the whole method.
- Ten minutes is long by today's standardsQuarter-inch calf's liver cooked ten minutes will be grey through and firm. Two to three minutes a side, until the surface is browned, gives a far better texture; note that the USDA safe internal temperature for liver and other variety meats is 160F, which will leave it cooked through rather than pink.
- Washing and dryingThe rinse was for stray blood and butcher's debris. Skip it if the liver is clean, but the drying matters: a wet surface steams instead of browning. Pat both sides thoroughly.
- The membraneLiver often comes with the outer membrane still on, and the recipe says nothing about it. If yours has it, peel it away or the slices curl in the pan.
- Bacon then, bacon nowTurn-of-the-century bacon was dry-cured and rendered a good deal of fat. Modern wet-cured bacon releases water first; let it cook off before the slices will crisp, and you may need to supplement the drippings with a little butter for the liver.
- The gravyOne tablespoon flour to the fat left in the pan makes a thin pan gravy, not a thick sauce. Add roughly a cup of boiling water, a little at a time and stirring as you go, as the recipe directs.
- YieldFigure 4 to 6 oz of liver per person, so 1 to 1 1/2 lb for four, with bacon to taste since the recipe uses it as a garnish.
Liver and bacon is an old economy of the butcher's shop: offal was cheap and perishable, and best eaten quickly, and the salt pork or bacon that fried alongside it supplied both fat for the pan and seasoning for a meat that has little of its own. Calf's liver commanded a premium over beef, sheep or pig liver for its mildness and fine grain, which is why it earns its own heading here. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued cookbooks as part of a broader household-instruction list aimed at middle-class American women around the turn of the twentieth century, and the closing sentence about slow bacon and rapid liver reads as a transferable principle rather than a rigid rule.