Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Calf's Liver-Stewed
Calf's Liver-Stewed
Boil till partly done; take out of the sauce-pan; chop in small pieces; put back in the sauce-pan; skim well; stew until tender; season with butter, pepper and salt; thicken with a little flour, and serve over slices of toasted bread.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century method with no quantities, no timings and no liquid specified. The one thing worth knowing before starting is that calf's liver turns grainy and hard the moment it is overcooked, and this recipe as written invites exactly that.
- Quantities to work fromThe original gives none. About 1 1/2 lb of liver, cut into two or three large pieces, is a practical amount and feeds four over toast.
- The liquidNone is specified. "Boil" is best read as barely covered in water or light stock in the saucepan, kept at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil; liver seizes and squeaks between the teeth if the liquid moves hard.
- "Partly done"Six to eight minutes at a simmer for large pieces is enough to firm the outside so it chops cleanly. It should still be rosy inside at this stage.
- Timing after chopping"Stew until tender" is misleading for liver, which never becomes tender with long cooking the way stewing beef does; it goes the other way. Once chopped, give it five minutes at most in the skimmed liquid, just to heat through and finish.
- SkimmingLiver throws a heavy grey-brown scum. Lift it off thoroughly or the finished sauce will be muddy and taste faintly of blood.
- Thickening"A little flour" means a slurry or a small beurre manie: about 1 tablespoon flour worked into 1 tablespoon of the butter, stirred in and simmered a minute or two to lose the raw taste. The butter in the seasoning step can do double duty here.
- TrimmingModern liver comes with the membrane and the larger tubes often still attached. Pull the membrane off before cooking and cut out the tough vessels as you chop, or they will show up as rubbery threads.
- ServingThick-cut white bread, toasted dry and unbuttered, so it takes up the sauce without going to paste. Onions are absent here, but are a natural companion and worth adding softened in butter.
Calf's liver was the aristocrat of offal in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens: milder and finer-grained than ox liver, and dearer than the ox and pig livers sold alongside it. Serving stewed meats over toasted bread is an older English habit that survived well into the nineteenth century as a way of extending a small quantity of meat. The Home Cook Book, published in Toronto in 1877 as a charitable fundraiser compiled from contributors' recipes, is typical of the genre in assuming the reader already knew how much liver to buy and how long to cook it.