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Chicken Livers in Cases
Take eight fat livers, remove the gall, trim off all the green part, plunge them into boiling water and poach without boiling; drain, pare slightly and cut each into halves. Put with the trimmings of these livers a few more livers in a fryingpan, add a little lard, and fry them; when cool, put them in a mortar with an equal quantity of fat bacon finely chopped, pound, sprinkle in pepper, salt and spices, pass it through a sieve and then mix with it two tablespoonfuls of quenelle forcemeat, two tablespoonfuls each of sweet herbs and onions, four tablespoonfuls each of truffles and mushrooms, all finely chopped; mix with this a few tablespoonfuls of melted glaze; take eight cases, either square or round, oil and line them inside with half of the above mixture. Fry the livers in a little butter and two tablespoonfuls of white wine over a quick fire. When the wine is reduced take out the livers, put them on a plate, dip a paste brush with melted glaze and brush them over with it. Cut each of the halves of livers in halves again, put two pieces in each of the cases, cover them with a layer of forcemeat, put a piece of paper dipped in oil over each, then stand the cases on a baking sheet, and warm them at the entrance of a moderate oven. Put the cases of liver on a hot dish, pour a little reduced brown sauce over each, and serve.
Chicken Livers on Skewers Take the livers of eighteen chickens, clean, cut away the galls and dry them well with a cloth; season with salt and pepper and cut each liver into halves. In the meantime cut off six slices of lean bacon and broil them for one minute, then cut each slice into six pieces. Take six silver skewers (attelettes), run one through the center of the liver, next a piece of bacon, and continue in this way until the six skewers are filled with the pieces of liver and bacon. Roll them in a tablespoonful of oil, dip them into sifted breadcrumbs and put them on a moderate fire to broil for five minutes on each side. Arrange them on a hot dish, pour over half a gill of maitre d'hotel butter, and serve with a little watercress for garnish. Chicken Livers Stewed in Madeira Wine Take the livers of ten or twelve fowls, cut away the galls, dry them with a cloth and fry them in a saucepan with one ounce of butter over a brisk fire for five minutes; season with salt and pepper; add a half wineglassful of Madeira wine, reduce for one minute, then moisten with half a pint of Spanish sauce and cook again for three minutes; add half an ounce of butter and the juice of half a lemon, tossing the pan without letting the contents boil. Pour the whole on a hot dish, and serve garnished with six croutons of bread. Chickens' Livers Stewed with Mushrooms Prepare the same as for fowl's livers stewed in Madeira wine; adding three minutes before serving six sliced mushrooms.
Minced Chicken, Polish Style Take some pieces of cold fowl, mince and put into a stewpan with bechamel sauce and stir over the fire until hot, but not boiling. Garnish with croutons of fried bread.
Four short liver preparations and a minced chicken, written in the shorthand of a professional brigade that assumed a stocked sauce station. Most of the work is in the components the text names but does not explain.
- CasesThese are croustades — fireproof paper cases, hollowed bread or baked pastry shells — not a covered casserole dish. The recipe has you oil the cases and lay a piece of oiled paper over each; small ramekins or baked tartlet shells stand in.
- Glaze"Melted glaze" is glace de viande: brown stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets solid when cold. A tablespoon or two of commercial demi-glace concentrate, thinned slightly, gives the same gloss and body.
- Quenelle forcemeatA pounded panada of white meat or veal with egg and cream, used here as binder rather than as dumplings. Fine chicken mousseline from a food processor does the same job and spares you the mortar.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of the period — brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A good demi-glace is the practical substitute; the "reduced brown sauce" of the first recipe is the same family.
- Oven temperature"The entrance of a moderate oven" means the coolest part of the oven; "moderate" is usually read as somewhere around 350F. The cases are only being warmed through here — the livers are already cooked and will turn grainy if they are baked.
- The gallModern packaged livers have usually had the gall bladder removed, but check each lobe for a green stain and cut it away generously. A nicked gall bladder makes the whole batch bitter, which is why the instruction opens three of these recipes.
- Cooking time on liversThe five minutes over a brisk fire in the Madeira version is for whole livers in a hot pan; halved livers need appreciably less. Past that they go chalky, and the final tossing with butter and lemon is specifically kept off the boil to stop the sauce breaking.
- A gillHalf a cup. Half a gill of maître d'hôtel butter — butter creamed with parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — is about four tablespoons for six skewers.
- Skewers and yieldAttelettes were decorative silver skewers used for presentation at table; plain metal skewers work, and wooden ones will scorch under a five-minute-a-side broil. Each of these serves six to eight as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and this cluster of liver dishes shows how closely the American grand hotel followed the French repertoire it had imported wholesale. Chicken livers were cheap trim from the poultry butcher, and turning them into forcemeat-lined cases with truffles, glaze and espagnole is exactly the logic of classical kitchen economy: an offcut is elevated by labour and by sauces already standing on the stove. The attelette skewers of the second recipe belong to an older tradition of ornamental service, when garnishes were mounted on silver for the buffet; by Oscar's day they were becoming a flourish rather than a necessity. "Polish style" for the minced chicken is one of the loose national tags common in nineteenth-century French cookery, rarely pointing to any documented Polish origin.