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Calf's Liver, Minute
Cut twelve very thin slices from a fresh piece of calf's liver; place on a plate and season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, then lightly turn the pieces in flour. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted lard on a large frying pan, place the slices in the pan, one beside another, and fry for a minute and a half on each side. Lift up with a fork, dress on a hot dish, sprinkle with half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, squeeze the juice of a lemon over and serve.
A fast pan-fry that lives or dies on the thickness of the slices and the heat of the pan. Almost nothing here needs updating except the fat and the finish.
- Slice thin, and coldThe "minute" in the title is literal: the recipe wants slices thin enough to cook through in the ninety seconds given, so aim for about 1/8 inch (the recipe itself says only "very thin"). Firm the liver in the freezer for 20 minutes and use a long sharp knife; thicker slices will still be raw at 90 seconds and grey and grainy by the time they are not.
- Peel the membraneCalf's liver comes with a thin outer membrane that shrinks and curls the slices in a hot pan. Pull it away from the whole lobe before slicing and cut out any large tubes.
- Salt timingThe recipe seasons on the plate before flouring, which draws moisture and makes the flour gummy if it sits. Season and flour immediately before the liver hits the fat, and shake off the excess so it fries rather than pastes.
- The fatTwo tablespoons lard for twelve slices is on the lean side for a large pan. Lard, clarified butter or a neutral oil all work; whole butter alone will burn at the heat needed.
- Heat is the hingeThe pan must be hot enough that the slices sizzle sharply on contact. A crowded or lukewarm pan steams the liver, which turns it tough and leaks blood into the flour coating. Fry in two batches on a 12-inch pan rather than one.
- DonenessNinety seconds a side leaves the centre faintly pink, which is correct for calf's liver and the whole point of the dish. Cooked to uniform brown it becomes dry and mealy.
- YieldTwelve thin slices will stretch to about four as a main course or six as a first course, though the recipe itself gives no yield. Have the hot dish, parsley and lemon ready before you start; the frying is over in a few minutes.
- FinishLemon juice squeezed over hot liver is the whole sauce. If you want more, deglaze the pan with a splash of wine or stock after the last batch and pour it over.
Calf's liver held a rank in early twentieth-century cookery that beef liver never did: pale, mild and comparatively expensive, it tended to appear on restaurant menus and in books like this one as a quick a la minute order rather than as thrift cookery. The name reads as kitchen shorthand -- a dish fired off in a minute to order, the sense also carried by the French a la minute and by the professional cook's "minute steak." The flour dredge, hot fat, parsley and lemon are a standard Continental treatment, close to the handling given to escalopes of veal or to fried sole, and the lemon is doing real work: acid cuts the mineral richness of offal. Liver's fall from favour in home kitchens is largely a later twentieth-century development; at the time this book circulated it was ordinary enough to need no introduction.