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Mutton Liver, Loraine
Cut a very fresh mutton liver in twelve slices and evenly season all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in frying pan, add the liver, and briskly fry three minutes on each side. Remove and keep on a plate. Add one each finely minced onion, green pepper and bean of garlic to the pan and gently brown for eight minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add three tablespoons flour, stir well, and brown three minutes more. Pour in two gills pure tomato juice, a half gill white wine, a half gill water, three saltspoons salt, a half saltspoon cayenne pepper and a half teaspoon chopped parsley. Continually mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then add the mutton liver, cover pan, and set in oven forty-five minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A braised liver in tomato and wine, written in the compressed house style of a professional chef. The measurements are pre-metric American restaurant units and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato juice is 1 cup and a half gill of wine or water is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making "three saltspoons salt" about 3/4 teaspoon and the cayenne a bare 1/8 teaspoon.
- Bean of garlicProbably a rendering of the French gousse d'ail (literally a pod or husk); either way it means one clove, not one head.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, 325–350°F, will hold the sauce at a bare simmer; much hotter and it will cook down to paste in three-quarters of an hour.
- The braising time is the problemLiver is already cooked through after the six minutes of frying. Forty-five minutes in the oven produces the firm, grainy, sliceable texture that period cooking liked; modern palates generally do not. If you want liver still pink at the centre, sear it, build and simmer the sauce for 20–30 minutes on its own, then return the slices for the last five minutes only.
- Mutton liverTrue mutton — older sheep, usually reckoned at over a year and often over two — is rare outside halal and specialist butchers. Lamb's liver is the practical substitute and is milder. Either is commonly soaked 30 minutes in milk before cooking, drained and patted dry, which is said to draw out some of the metallic edge. Slice about 1/2 inch thick.
- "Very fresh"Not a flourish. Liver deteriorates fast and turns bitter; buy it the day you cook it and look for a glossy, deep surface with no grey bloom.
- Tomato juice"Pure tomato juice" in 1906 meant strained fresh or canned tomatoes, not the seasoned, salted drink sold today. Use passata or sieved canned tomatoes, and taste before adding the full 3/4 teaspoon salt.
- YieldTwelve slices is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of liver — four to six servings. Rice, mashed potato or plain boiled noodles take the sauce well.
The International Cook Book is Alexander Filippini's vast 1906 compendium, written by a chef who had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York and who gathered thousands of very short recipes, many of them filed under proper names. Dishes labelled with a personal or place name — Loraine, Bordelaise, Béatrice — were the standard restaurant shorthand of the era for a particular garnish or sauce treatment rather than a claim of geographic origin, and the name attached here does little to explain a sauce built on tomato, green pepper, garlic and cayenne, which reads closer to Creole cooking. What the recipe does show plainly is how offal was treated in the professional kitchen of the period: liver was cheap, sold everywhere, and given the same careful sauce work as a cut of loin. Mutton was still ordinary meat in America at this date; its retreat to the margins came later, with the shift to younger lamb.