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Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Fowls
No. 127. Minuta di Fegatini (Ragout of Fowls' Livers) or Ingredients: Fowls' turkeys' livers, flour, butter, parsley, onions, salt, pepper, stock, Chablis.
Cut the livers in half, flour them, and fry lightly in butter with chopped parsley, very little chopped onion, salt and pepper, then add a quarter pint of boiling stock and half a glass of Chablis, and cook until the sauce is somewhat reduced. You can also cook the livers simply in good meat gravy, but in this case they should not be floured. Serve with a border of macaroni (No. 183), or Risotto (No. 190), or Polenta (No. 187).
No. 128. Minuta alla Visconti (Chickens' Livers) Ingredients: Fowls' livers, eggs, cheese, butter, cream, cayenne pepper.
Braize two fowls' livers in butter, then pound them up, and mix with a little cream, tablespoonful of grated cheese and a dust of cayenne. a Spread this rather thickly over small squares of toast, and keep them hot whilst you make a custard with half an ounce of butter, an egg well beaten up, and a tablespoonful of cheese. Stir it over the fire till thick and then spread it on the hot toast.
Serve very hot. This makes a good savoury.
No. 129. Croûtons alla Principesca Ingredients: Croûtons, tongue, sweetbread, truffles, fowl or game, Veluté sauce, stock, eggs, butter.
Fry a bit of bread in butter till it is a light brown colour, then cut it into heart-shaped pieces. Prepare a ragoût with bits of tongue, sweetbread, fowl or game, truffles, two or three spoonsful of well-reduced Veluté sauce (No. 2), and two or three of reduced gravy.
Put a spoonful of the ragoût in each croûton, and over it a layer of fowl forcemeat half an inch thick; trim the edges neatly, glaze them with the yolk of eggs beaten up, and put them in a buttered fire-proof dish in the oven for twenty minutes.
Then glaze them with reduced stock and serve hot.
For a maigre dish use fish for the ragoût and forcemeat.
No. 130. Croûtons alla Romana Ingredients: Bread, fowl forcemeat, tongue, truffles, herbs, cream, stock, butter, flour, eggs.
Cut a bit of crumb of bread into round or square shapes, and on each put a spoonful of fowl or rabbit forcemeat, a little chopped tongue, and a slight flavouring of chopped herbs; cover with a slice of bread the same shape as the underneath piece, put them in a buttered fire-proof dish, and moisten them well with cream, butter, and stock.
Cook until all the liquor is absorbed, but turn them over so that both sides may be well cooked, then flour and dip them into beaten-up eggs; fry them a good colour and serve very hot.
For a maigre dish use forcemeat of fish or lobster, and more cream instead of stock.
Four preparations for poultry livers and rich croûtons, written in the Edwardian style that assumes the cook knows how much to buy. Quantities are almost entirely absent, so treat these as ratios and method rather than fixed formulas.
- The hinge: do not overcook the liversChicken and turkey livers stiffen and turn grainy once they are pushed hard. Fry them briefly on each side, then let them finish gently in the reducing sauce off a hard boil; poultry liver should still be cooked through (70C/158F at the centre) rather than left rosy.
- Quarter pint and half a glassA quarter pint in an English book of this date is 5 fl oz, so a generous half cup of stock. "Half a glass" of Chablis is imprecise: period measures put a wineglassful at around 2 fl oz, while a table glass held rather more, so anything from 1 to 2 fl oz fits. Any dry, unoaked white does the same work.
- Braize, in No. 128Here it means nothing more than gently cooking the livers covered in butter until firm enough to pound — not a long moist braise. Two livers pounded with cream and cheese gives enough paste for four to six small toasts.
- The cheese custardHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. Stir the egg, butter and cheese over the gentlest heat, or a bowl set over simmering water; taken too fast it scrambles and cannot be spread.
- Veluté sauceThe cross-reference is to the book's No. 2; a velouté of this period is generally a pale roux slackened with white stock. Reduce it hard, as instructed, or the ragoût will slump out of the croûtons.
- ForcemeatFowl forcemeat here means chicken or rabbit meat pounded smooth with butter or cream and seasoning, close to a mousseline and easily made in a food processor. A raw farce is the reading that makes sense of the twenty minutes in the oven, since it needs to set around the filling.
- Oven for the croûtonsNo temperature is given. Twenty minutes at a moderate oven, 350F/180C, will set a half-inch layer of forcemeat through; check that the centre is opaque and firm.
- Maigre dishesMaigre means meatless, for fast days and Fridays. The fish and lobster substitutions at the end of Nos. 129 and 130 are there for that reason, not as a variation for its own sake.
- ServingNo. 128 the book itself calls "a good savoury"; Nos. 129 and 130 are of the same small-hot-mouthful type and would suit that course or a first course. No. 127, with its border of macaroni, risotto or polenta, is a course in itself, though the recipe fixes no number of livers and so no yield.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) by Mrs W. G. Waters framed a collection of Italian recipes inside a Boccaccian conceit of ten diners and ten days, with menus attached. Its aim was to persuade English households that Italian cooking was more than macaroni, and a plain sauté of poultry livers finished with wine and stock served that argument well. The names attached to two of these, alla Visconti and alla Principesca, look like the nineteenth-century habit of borrowing aristocratic or courtly titles for garnish combinations rather than pointing to any documented family recipe. The croûton dishes sit comfortably in an English context: the savoury, a small hot, salty mouthful served after the sweet at dinner, a course that flourished in Britain from the late nineteenth century and had faded by the mid twentieth. That these are built on tongue, sweetbread and truffle scraps also suits a kitchen where a fowl was jointed at home and nothing edible was thrown away.