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Chicken Livers, Saute, with Bacon
Remove the gall bag from twelve fresh chicken livers; wash and drain on a cloth. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add livers, season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, briskly fry four minutes on each side. Lift up, place on a dish, arrange six slices broiled bacon over them and serve.
A straightforward pan sauté that needs only a few translations and one correction to the timing.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper. That is a generous amount by modern taste; start with half and adjust.
- Cooking timeEight minutes total will give you grey, grainy livers. Trimmed chicken livers need only about 2 to 3 minutes per side over medium-high heat. Note that food-safety guidance for poultry, including liver, is 165F throughout, which means fully firm and no longer pink at the centre; if you want them faintly pink you are trading safety for texture, and that is a choice to make knowingly rather than by accident.
- The gall bagModern supermarket livers are usually already free of the gall bladder, but check each lobe for a greenish stain or a small greenish sac and cut it away generously. Any gall left behind turns the whole pan bitter.
- Dry them properly"Drain on a cloth" is the hinge of the recipe. Wet livers steam rather than brown, and they spit violently in hot butter. Pat them thoroughly dry and let them sit uncovered a few minutes before they go in the pan.
- Fat and panOne tablespoon of butter for twelve livers is meagre and butter alone will scorch at browning heat. Use a heavy skillet with a tablespoon of the rendered bacon fat plus the butter, and work in two batches so the pan stays hot.
- Bacon"Broiled bacon" means bacon cooked under direct heat until crisp; a hot oven at 400F on a rack does the same job with less attention. Cook it first and keep it warm so the livers can go straight from pan to plate.
- YieldTwelve livers and six rashers serve three as a main course or six as a savoury or breakfast dish. Deglaze the pan with a splash of sherry or Madeira and pour it over if you want a sauce.
A household that bought or killed whole birds accumulated livers a few at a time, and a recipe calling for twelve assumes either a poulterer's tray or a kitchen used to handling several fowl at once. Pairing them with bacon follows the long-standing English and American habit of setting a fatty cured pork against rich offal " theneys and liver and bacon.