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Chicken Livers Saute with Madeira
Remove the gall bags from fifteen very fresh chicken livers, thoroughly wipe, place on a plate, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and turn well in seasoning. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, arrange the livers in one beside another, and briskly cook for three minutes on each side. Pour in three tablespoons sherry and boil for five minutes, then add a good gill demi-glace, lightly mix and briskly cook for six minutes, dress on a deep dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward pan sauté that hinges on one thing the original does not flag: the livers spend a further eleven minutes in simmering sauce after they are already cooked through.
- Total cooking timeThree minutes a side browns 15 livers, and the subsequent five-minute wine reduction plus six minutes in the demi-glace will take them well past firm into chalky. Modern practice is to sear the livers, remove them to a warm plate, build the sauce in the pan, and return them for the last minute only.
- A gillHalf a cup, or four fluid ounces. "A good gill" means a generous half cup — call it 5 oz of demi-glace.
- Demi-glaceA reduction of brown stock and espagnole sauce, kept as a standing item in a professional kitchen of this period. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; failing that, reduce a cup of strong brown chicken or veal stock to a scant half cup and finish it with a small knob of butter.
- Madeira or sherryThe title says Madeira and the method says sherry. The two are close enough in role that one is commonly substituted for the other in a fortified-wine pan sauce; use a dry sercial Madeira or a fino/amontillado, not a sweet cream sherry.
- Gall bagsThe greenish bile sac attached to one lobe. Livers sold today are usually trimmed, but check each one and cut away any lobe stained green or yellow — bile is intensely bitter and will spoil the whole pan.
- The pan and the fatOne tablespoon of butter for 15 livers is thin. Use a wide heavy skillet with butter and a little oil, and cook in two batches if they will not sit in a single uncrowded layer; crowded livers steam rather than brown.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt for roughly a pound of livers is on the high side once a reduced demi-glace joins them. Salt lightly at the start and correct at the end.
- YieldFifteen livers is around 1 to 1¼ lb — four servings as a main course over toast, rice or mashed potato, or six as an appetiser.
Chicken livers cooked hard and fast, then bound with a spoonful of brown sauce and a splash of fortified wine, are a fixture of the classical French repertoire that this book reproduces almost as shorthand. The recipe assumes a kitchen with demi-glace already made -- one of the more labour-intensive items in the professional larder, and the reason a dish like this reads as three lines to a professional and an afternoon's work to a home cook. Madeira and sherry both reached the classical kitchen through long-established Atlantic wine trades, and their oxidised, nutty character was valued for what it does with browned meat juices and organ meats. Liver was cheap and common in period cookery; recipes of this kind survive today largely in the bistro and in Venetian-style preparations with onions, but the technique here -- sear, deglaze, sauce, serve at once -- is unchanged.