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Chicken Livers, Saute, with Mushrooms
Cut a pound of very fresh chicken livers into halves, and see that they are completely freed from the gall bag. Heat two tablespoons lard in a frying pan, place in livers, briskly fry for five minutes, tossing meanwhile and drain on a sieve. Wipe pan, replace livers, add six finely sliced canned mushrooms, two tablespoons sherry, one and a half gills demi-glace, half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper; mix well, cook six minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile, transfer livers to a deep dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward saut—the only real obstacles are the archaic measures and a sauce that no longer sits in most home refrigerators.
- The hinge: don't cook them twiceFive minutes of brisk frying followed by six minutes in the sauce will leave a pound of halved livers grey and chalky. Sear them hard for two to three minutes so they stay rosy in the centre, hold them aside while the sauce reduces, and return them for the last minute only.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is about 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is a very assertive amount of cayenne for a pound of livers — start with half that.
- Demi-glaceIn the classical kitchen of this period this meant a reduced brown sauce made from veal stock and espagnole, kept as a standing preparation in a professional kitchen. Commercial demi-glace concentrate works, or reduce 1 1/2 cups of good brown stock by half and thicken it lightly.
- The gall bagThe instruction still matters. Any greenish-stained patch on the liver should be cut away generously, not rinsed — bile is intensely bitter and will carry through the whole dish.
- Canned mushroomsSix canned mushrooms is a small quantity, perhaps half a small tin, drained. Fresh cremini sliced and browned separately give far more flavour; canned mushrooms had the advantage of keeping.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard is authentic and fries cleanly at high heat. Clarified butter or a neutral oil finished with butter both work; whole butter alone will burn at the temperature you need.
- Dry the liversPat them thoroughly dry and don't crowd the pan. Wet livers in a full pan steam rather than sear, and you lose the browning the recipe's short cooking time depends on.
- YieldA pound serves four as a first course or over toast, two or three as a main with rice or mashed potato.
Chicken livers sautéed with mushrooms in a wine-spiked brown sauce is standard French bistro and hotel cooking of the period, and its presence in an "international" collection reflects how thoroughly the classical French repertoire was treated as the professional default in early twentieth-century American kitchens. The tell is the demi-glace: the recipe assumes the reader has a pot of reduced brown sauce already made, which was true of a restaurant brigade and almost never of a home cook, and it is why so many books of this era read as translations of professional practice rather than domestic advice. Offal also made economic sense — a sauce built on sherry and stock turned a cheap cut into a course fit for a menu.