Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Goose Livers
Stewed Goose Livers
Take six goose's livers, clean and wash them thoroughly, and put them in a stewpan with two or three shallots, a piece of parsnip, a small bunch of sweet herbs, with a few sprigs of parsley tied up in it, two or three cloves, salt and pepper to taste and about three-quarters of a pint of clear stock. Move the saucepan to the side of the fire when boiling and keep the contents simmering gently until the livers are tender. When cooked take the livers out of the saucepan, being very careful not to break them, and cut them into slices. Take some of their cooking liquor to make the sauce, strain it into a small stewpan, thicken it with a little flour kneaded with butter, and stir it over the fire until boiling; next put into it a few sliced mushrooms and the sliced livers and let the whole simmer gently at the side of the fire for a few minutes. Turn the livers and mushrooms with the sauce over them on to a hot dish, garnish with thin rolls of fried bacon and small croutons of bread fried brown in butter, and serve.
A hotel-kitchen braise of whole livers, sliced after cooking and finished in their own thickened liquor. The whole thing turns on gentle heat: the livers must never reach a rolling boil.
- "The side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the top plate, where a pan barely trembles. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting, or move the pan half off the heat; you want bare shivering, not bubbles.
- Which goose liverThe recipe does not specify, but ordinary unfattened goose liver appears to be meant; six will come to roughly 1 1/2 lb. Fattened liver (foie gras) will render to fat and collapse under this treatment and is best not substituted; it is also restricted in some jurisdictions. Duck livers, or two or three chicken livers per goose liver, are the usual stand-ins if goose is unavailable.
- The stock measureThree-quarters of a pint in this American book is about 1 1/2 cups. If you are working from an English edition of the same era, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz and the figure comes to 1 3/4 cups.
- TimingAt a bare simmer whole goose livers should be tender in something like 12 to 18 minutes; much longer and they go chalky and crumble when sliced, which is one reason the recipe warns you to be careful not to break them when lifting them out. Cut one to check that it is cooked through.
- Thickening"Flour kneaded with butter" is beurre manié — equal weights soft butter and flour worked to a paste, about 1 tablespoon of each for this quantity, whisked into the strained liquor in small pieces. It must come to a boil once to lose the raw flour taste, before the livers go back in.
- The parsnipIt is an aromatic here, not a vegetable to be served. A two-inch length, peeled, adds sweetness to the stock; lift it out with the herb bundle and cloves when you strain.
- MushroomsSliced raw mushrooms will leak water into the finished sauce. Sweat them separately in butter first, then add, unless you want a looser gravy.
- Yield and servingServes four as a first course, two or three as a main. The croutons and bacon are structural rather than decorative — they give the only crisp texture on the plate, so fry them last and keep them dry.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 cook book is essentially the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen that answered to a European-trained brigade. Stewed goose liver belongs to that Franco-German end of the book: whole goose livers were a staple of Alsatian and southern German cooking, and Strasbourg's reputation for goose liver was already old by then, though the celebrated version there was the fattened liver made into terrines rather than a simple braise like this one. The recipe assumes you can get six livers at once — a supposition a home cook today cannot make. The finish is thoroughly nineteenth-century restaurant practice: cook in stock, strain, thicken with beurre manié, return the meat to the sauce for a moment, and ring the dish with fried bread and bacon.