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Minced Liver
To each cup of cold, minced liver, add one tablespoonful of chopped onion browned in butter, and season with salt and a little paprika. Turn into an agate frying-pan with a little water. Sprinkle lightly with flour and add one-quarter cup of vinegar. Simmer until well heated.
A reheated-leftovers dish that lives or dies on the sourness of the vinegar and on not cooking the liver a second time in any real sense. Treat it as a fast pan sauce built around meat that is already done.
- The hinge: barely heat itThe liver is already cooked. "Simmer until well heated" means three or four minutes at most, just long enough for the flour to thicken and the vinegar to lose its raw edge. Liver held at a simmer turns grainy and dry very quickly.
- Agate frying-panAgate (or agateware) is speckled enamel fused onto steel — a non-reactive surface. That matters here because of the vinegar. Use enamelled cast iron or stainless steel, not bare cast iron or aluminium, which will turn the sauce metallic and grey.
- The vinegarA quarter cup to one cup of liver is assertive by modern taste, and vinegar strength was not standardised in this period, so the original need not have been as sharp as 5 per cent distilled white. Start with half that amount, cider or malt rather than distilled white, and add more once it has heated through.
- Sprinkle lightly with flourPerhaps two teaspoons per cup of liver, though the amount is left to the cook. Scatter it over the meat rather than tipping it in in one place, so it does not clump before the vinegar goes in.
- How much water'A little water' is left undefined; a few tablespoons up to about a quarter cup, enough with the vinegar to make a scant sauce that coats, fits the sense. It should look like gravy, not soup.
- Which liverWritten for whatever was left from a roast or a fry; the recipe does not say which, though calf's or beef liver are the likely candidates. Cold cooked chicken livers work and are milder; beef liver reheated in vinegar is strong, and the acid is doing the work of cutting it.
- Yield and servingOne cup of minced liver feeds two as a light supper dish. Serve on toast, with boiled potatoes, or over rice — it needs something starchy to absorb the sour sauce.
Cookbooks of leftovers were a small industry in the English-speaking kitchen from the 1890s through the First World War, when household thrift was both an economic necessity and a moral posture promoted by the domestic-science movement. Liver belonged to that economy twice over: cheap to begin with, and unwelcome cold, so it needed a second dish to carry it. The vinegar treatment here does what acid generally does for reheated meat — it sharpens flavours that have gone flat and dull in the icebox — and it may perhaps echo the sour-braise tradition of German and Central European cookery, which had a strong presence in American home kitchens of the period.