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Calf's Liver, Lyonnaise
Procure six four-ounce slices calf's liver and season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Heat thoroughly two tablespoons leaf lard in a sautoire, add liver and briskly cook on open fire for two minute on each side. Take up liver, place on a plate, add to pan two sliced onions and fry until a light brown, adding a tablespoon flour. Stir well while heating for two minutes, then pour in a gill white broth, two tablespoons vinegar, mix well, and let boil for ten minutes. Add the liver with a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons pepper. Mix well, cover pan and let cook for ten minutes, remove, dress liver on a hot dish, pour all contents of pan over and serve.
A straightforward sauté with an onion-and-vinegar pan sauce, written for a cook who already knows how liver behaves. The measurements are the main obstacle, along with a total cooking time that modern practice would cut.
- The hinge: total cooking timeTwo minutes a side plus ten minutes simmering in the sauce leaves 4-ounce slices grey and grainy. Sear the slices to a rosy centre, build the sauce separately, then return the liver for a minute or two at the end just to heat through.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "three saltspoons salt" is three-quarters of a teaspoon and "two saltspoons pepper" is half a teaspoon.
- Total saltBetween the initial seasoning and the sauce the recipe calls for close to two teaspoons of salt for six slices, on top of whatever the broth carries. Season the liver lightly, then salt the finished sauce to taste.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold all six slices in one layer. Crowding steams the liver instead of browning it; work in two batches if the pan is small.
- Leaf lardRendered fat from around the pig's kidneys, mild and clean-tasting. Ordinary lard, clarified butter or a neutral oil all work; butter alone will scorch at the heat this needs.
- White brothAn unroasted stock, veal or chicken, made without browning the bones. A light chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; avoid dark beef stock, which will bury the vinegar.
- "Briskly cook on open fire"High, direct heat on an uncovered burner rather than anything to do with flames. Get the pan properly hot before the liver goes in, and pat the slices dry so they sear.
- Sourcing the liverAsk for calf's liver sliced about half an inch thick, and have the butcher peel the outer membrane, which shrinks and curls in the pan. Beef liver can be substituted but is stronger and coarser.
- YieldSix slices serve six as a main course with potatoes, or four generously.
"Lyonnaise" on a French menu is shorthand for onions, a marker of the cooking of Lyon and its surrounding onion-growing country, and it attaches to potatoes, tripe, sauces and, as here, liver. The vinegar splashed into the pan is what makes the dish work: it cuts the richness of the fat and the mineral edge of the offal at once, the same logic behind foie de veau au vinaigre still served in Lyonnais bouchons. Organ meats were cheap, quick and unremarkable in the early twentieth century, which is why calf's liver could be printed without apology.