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August 6
Menu: Baked Liver and Bacon; Mashed Potatoes Corn on Cob; Lettuce and Pineapple Salad; Stewed Pears; Cream; Hasty Cake Coffee Baked Liver and Bacon-Select liver, wash it well, rub it with Crisco, and place it in vinegar with 1 chopped shallot, a little chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to suit taste. Let it stand overnight; roast it, adding strips of bacon. Baste it frequently with the vinegar mixture. When done, make brown gravy, and serve very hot.
A whole lobe of liver, marinated overnight and oven-roasted rather than sliced and fried — a treatment closer to a small roast than to the diner standby. The original gives no oven temperature, no weight and no time, so the numbers below are the ones the method implies.
- What liver to buy"Select liver" here probably just means choose your liver well; calf's liver is the mild and expensive one, beef liver is stronger and coarser, lamb's liver a reasonable middle. A whole lobe of about 2 lb suits the method better than pre-cut slices, which will dry out over a long roast.
- The vinegar marinadePlain cider or white wine vinegar, enough to come halfway up the meat, with the shallot, parsley, salt and pepper. Straight vinegar will firm and grey the outer layer of the liver overnight; it also tames the mineral taste.
- Marinate cold"Let it stand overnight" assumes a cool larder or icebox. Marinate it covered in the refrigerator, and reserve the marinade for basting only while the meat is still cooking; stop basting at least ten minutes before the liver comes out, or boil the leftover marinade separately before it touches the finished roast.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this: hot enough to crisp the bacon, gentle enough that the interior does not seize.
- Doneness is the hingeLiver goes from tender to grainy and dry in a very short window, but it is offal and should be taken to 160F in the centre rather than left rosy. For a lobe of around 2 lb that is roughly 45 minutes to an hour, though the recipe gives neither weight nor time. Overcooked liver cannot be rescued by gravy.
- Bacon and larding"Adding strips of bacon" means barding — laying the strips over the top so the fat renders down through a very lean meat. Larded liver, with strips threaded through the lobe using a larding needle, also appears in period cookery; overlapping rashers on the surface does most of the same work.
- Brown gravyRead it as a roux of Crisco and flour cooked to a nut brown, loosened with stock and the strained pan drippings. Keep the vinegar out of it or add only a spoonful, since the pan juices are already sharp.
- Crisco and substitutionsThe rub of Crisco is there because the book is selling it. Any neutral solid fat, or the bacon fat itself, does the same job of keeping the surface from drying before the bacon renders.
- YieldA 2 lb lobe serves four to six as a main course. Rest it ten minutes and carve across the grain in thin slices.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself was introduced — a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening pitched as a clean, odourless, all-purpose replacement for both lard and butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that this recipe comes from is arranged by date, a common device in period household books that solved the daily question of what to cook while working the sponsor's product into as many dishes as possible, including ones like this where a smear of shortening on a lobe of liver is doing very little. The dish itself is older than the book: roasting a calf's liver barded with bacon and steeped beforehand in vinegar and herbs appears in nineteenth-century cookery, the acid serving to soften the flavour of an organ meat that was cheap and highly perishable.