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Potted Turkey Livers
Prepare three or four turkey livers, place them in a stewpan together with some very fat bacon and fry them until they commence to brown; then put in with them one clove of garlic, one bay leaf, four or five cloves and one-half saltspoonful of pepper. Pour in one-half pint of red wine and leave the saucepan over the fire until the liquor boils; then remove it to the side and keep the contents simmering for thirty minutes or more; take the livers out of the stewpan, put them in a mortar with half their quantity of fresh butter and pound to a smooth paste, adding more seasoning if required. Press the pounded liver into small jars, leaving a space about one third of an inch at the top, which fill up with turkey fat or clarified butter. Cover the jars with paper and tie them down securely with twine. Keep them in a dry store cupboard for further use.
The cooking here is sound — the failure is the last sentence. Everything below is offered as explanation of an old preserving method, not as a working procedure.
- Why the storage failsPotted liver sealed under a layer of fat and held in a dry cupboard is a low-acid, low-oxygen, room-temperature food — the exact conditions in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. The 30-minute simmer kills vegetative bacteria but not spores, and the butter or turkey fat cap is an oxygen barrier rather than a sterilising seal. Paper and twine exclude dust and nothing else.
- No measured controlThe recipe gives no processing temperature, no holding time at temperature, no acidity, no salt or nitrite quantity, and no shelf-life limit. Potted meats of the period generally depended on salt, thoroughly cooked meat and a cool larder for keeping, none of which is specified here. Follow current tested guidance for any potted or preserved meat rather than this text.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of pepper is about an eighth of a teaspoon — very restrained by modern taste, and a reminder that the cloves and bay were meant to lead.
- Half a pint of red wineOne cup in US measure, assuming the American pint, which is the likely reading for a New York book of 1896 rather than the 20-ounce British pint.
- "Very fat bacon"This most likely means fat salt pork or unsmoked fatback used as a cooking medium rather than modern thin-sliced breakfast bacon. Its job is to render and supply the fat the livers fry in.
- "Remove it to the side"On a coal range, sliding the pan off the hot centre to the cooler edge was how you dropped from a boil to a bare simmer. On a gas or induction hob it simply means turning the heat down.
- Four or five clovesWhole cloves, and they are aggressive in this quantity against three or four livers.
- The mortarPounding liver with half its weight of butter is what gives the smooth, dense texture; a food processor reaches the same place faster but warms the butter, so the paste can break. This is the one technical point in the recipe worth keeping in mind.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 collection, was working in a tradition of potting that had long been household economy in Britain and America: cooked meat pounded with butter, packed into small pots and sealed under a fat cap so it would keep in a cool larder and could be spread on toast at short notice. Turkey livers may appear rather than chicken because a hotel kitchen breaking down birds by the dozen had them in quantity, and offal that could not be sent to the dining room in its own right was turned into something that could. Cupboard storage of potted meat was ordinary practice at the time; the organism responsible for botulism was not identified until the mid-1890s, and the danger of home-preserved low-acid foods was not widely understood until well into the following century.