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Broiled Calf's Liver with Bacon
Take a white and tender calf's liver weighing about a pound and a half, pare and trim off the hard portions, cut it into six slices of equal size and put them on a dish. Season with one tablespoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of pepper and one tablespoonful of sweet oil; mix well together. Broil for a few minutes on each side, arrange the slices on a hot dish and decorate with six thin, crisp slices of broiled bacon. Spread over the whole one gill of maitre d'hotel butter, and serve very hot.
A plain grill that lives or dies on timing: calf's liver turns granular and bitter the moment it goes past faintly pink. Everything else here is seasoning and assembly.
- Cut the saltA tablespoon of salt for a pound and a half of liver is roughly three times what most cooks would use now. A teaspoon of fine salt, or a scant two of kosher, is closer to the mark, and the bacon and maitre d'hotel butter both bring more.
- Sweet oilPeriod shorthand for olive oil, though the term was also used loosely for other bland salad oils; generally a mild-tasting grade rather than the peppery extra-virgin sold today. Any neutral or light olive oil does the job of keeping the slices from sticking to the bars.
- A gillHalf a cup, which is a great deal of compound butter over six slices. Two to three tablespoons, sliced into coins and left to melt on the hot platter, gives the same gloss without a pool.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled. It is not cooked; the heat of the meat is what melts it, so it must go on at the table, not on the grill.
- Thickness and heatSix slices from a pound and a half works out to about four ounces each, which for calf's liver means pieces of roughly half an inch. Under a very hot broiler or on a hot grill that is two to three minutes a side, no more. If you want the centre still rosy, note that USDA guidance puts variety meats such as liver at 160F, above the point at which pinkness survives.
- TrimmingThe "hard portions" are the outer membrane and the branching tubes running through the lobe. Peel the membrane away with your fingers before slicing or the slices will curl and buckle over the heat.
- BaconBroil or fry the bacon separately and hold it crisp on a warm plate. Cooking it alongside the liver leaves the fat undercooked by the time the liver is done.
- YieldSix slices, one to a plate, as a main course for six with potatoes and a green vegetable.
Liver and bacon was already old and thoroughly domestic when Oscar Tschirky put it in his 1896 collection: the pairing of a lean, faintly sweet organ meat with salty cured pork runs through English and German cooking alike, and Tschirky, Swiss-born and trained in New York hotel dining rooms, was writing for a kitchen that served both plain American food and the French repertoire. What marks it as a hotel recipe rather than a home one is the finish. Maitre d'hotel butter is the standard French grill garnish of the period, the thing sent out on broiled steaks, chops and fish alike, and the phrase means roughly "steward's butter" or the house butter, a mixture kept made up and sliced to order. Calf's liver, from a young animal, was the expensive grade; ox and pig liver went to cheaper tables and needed longer, wetter cooking.