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Boiled Beef Liver and Rice
Soak one and one-half pounds of liver in cold water for half an hour to remove the blood, boil it slowly in three pints of water together with one-half pound of rice, add an onion, a sprig of parsley, and when the liver and rice are nearly cooked add pepper and salt to taste, three tablespoonfuls of vinegar and a slice of bacon cut in pieces. Remove the liver, cut it in slices and return them to the stew till all are sufficiently done. Serve hot.
A plain one-pot dish from Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection, closer to a thick soup than a stew. The proportions work, but the method needs a light hand: liver held at a rolling boil turns grainy and dry.
- The hinge: never actually boil itKeep the pot at a bare simmer, with the surface just trembling. Beef liver goes from tender to chalky within a few minutes of hard boiling, and there is no recovering it.
- MeasuresThree pints is 6 cups (about 1.4 litres). Half a pound of rice is roughly 1 1/8 cups uncooked long-grain, which will absorb a good deal of that liquid and leave a loose, porridge-like body.
- Cook the liver in one piece, brieflyA 1 1/2 lb slab of beef liver needs perhaps 15-20 minutes at a simmer to reach the faintly pink centre that keeps it tender. The rice will take about the same. Sequence them so neither waits.
- Slicing and returningThe instruction to lift the liver, slice it and return it to the pot is meant to finish thick pieces evenly. Give the slices two or three minutes back in the pot, no more.
- The soakHalf an hour in cold water draws out blood and softens the strong mineral edge. Modern liver is usually sold already trimmed, but peel away any grey membrane and cut out the tough tubes at the centre before it goes in the pot.
- BaconA "slice of bacon" here probably means a thicker cut than a modern rasher. Two or three rashers of streaky bacon, diced, gives about the right amount of fat and salt.
- VinegarThree tablespoons of cider or white wine vinegar added near the end is what keeps the dish from tasting flat and heavy. Add it after the salt so you can judge both together.
- YieldServes four as a main course. It thickens considerably as it stands; loosen with hot water or stock when reheating.
Oscar Tschirky was the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, not a cook, and the 1896 book bearing his name gathers a great deal beyond the hotel's public menus. Dishes like this one belong to the plainer end of the collection: stretching liver with rice, an onion and a scrap of bacon is the logic of a staff meal or a household economy dish rather than a dining-room course. The pairing of liver with vinegar is long established in German and Central European cooking, where acid is used to cut the organ's richness, and Tschirky himself was Swiss-born. The soaking step, a common instruction in nineteenth-century cookbooks, reflects a time when offal reached the kitchen far closer to slaughter than it does now.