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Curried Calf's Liver
Cut two pounds of liver into small thin pieces. Fry two small sliced onions in a little butter, put in the pieces of liver and fry them, adding more butter as required. Mix two tablespoonfuls of curry powder with four tablespoonfuls of flour, stir it in with the liver, sprinkle salt, pepper and a little cayenne over, then stir all over the fire for two or three minutes, adding slowly one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of stock. Boil and turn all on to a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve. Calf's Liver, French Style Select a sound white liver, cut it into slices and place them in a saucepan with two thin slices of fat bacon, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, one finely chopped shallot, a small lump of butter, and pepper and salt to taste. Put on the lid and keep the saucepan close to a moderate fire in order that the liver may cook without simmering. When thoroughly done, which will take about an hour and a half, put it on a hot dish and keep it warm. Boil the gravy and bacon together, pour it over the liver, and serve at once. Calf's Liver, Milanese Style Cut a large, white liver into thin slices, pound these slightly, sprinkle over a little salt and mixed spices, dredge with flour, and dip in beaten eggs. Place some lard in a fryingpan, and when boiling plunge the slices of liver in. Fry them till well browned, and sprinkle a little salt over; arrange on a hot dish, and garnish with lemons cut in quarters, and serve.
Three liver preparations run together in one entry, the curry first. The governing point for all three is that calf's liver is a quick-cooking meat, and only one of these recipes treats it that way.
- Do not overcook the liverThin slices of calf's liver are done in a minute or two per side and turn grainy and dry past that. The curry works if the liver is browned briefly and finished in the sauce; the "French Style" instruction to cook it an hour and a half will give you something closer to pâté-textured, crumbly meat, which is what that recipe intends but not what most cooks want today.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. One and a half of them is somewhere between 12 and 15 fl oz of stock; start at 12 and add more if the sauce tightens.
- Two tablespoons of curry powderThat is a firm hand for two pounds of meat, and period curry powder may well have been milder, or staler, than what you will buy now. Add half, taste after the sauce has simmered, and adjust. Toast the powder in the butter with the flour for the full two or three minutes specified or it will taste raw and dusty.
- Four tablespoons of flourThis is a heavy roux for the 12 to 15 fl oz of stock called for and will set up thick, closer to a dressed hash than a sauce. Either cut the flour to two or three tablespoons or plan on loosening it with extra stock at the end.
- "Moderate fire" in the French styleThe point of the phrase is heat low enough that the liver never simmers — it sweats in its own juices under a lid. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, with the lid on.
- Frying in lardThe Milanese slices are shallow-fried in lard heated until it shimmers, around 350-365F. Any neutral fat with a decent smoke point does the same job; pound the slices thin and even so the egg-and-flour coating browns before the interior overcooks.
- SourcingCalf's liver, from a young animal, is paler and milder than beef liver and is the whole point of the "sound white liver" the recipe keeps calling for. It is a butcher-counter item; beef liver substituted will be stronger and coarser and wants soaking in milk first.
- YieldTwo pounds of liver with sauce and croutons serves four to six as a main course.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his compendium in 1896, and its curry entries show how thoroughly curry powder had settled into Anglo-American hotel cooking by then — not as Indian food but as a standard sauce treatment applied to whatever the kitchen had, generally sold ready-blended. That three consecutive liver recipes appear here, labelled curried, French and Milanese, is characteristic of the book's method: a single cheap organ meat presented in the several national styles a large hotel kitchen was expected to produce on demand.