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September 3
Menu: Stewed Liver with Mushrooms; Baked Potatoes Scalloped Egg Plant; Celery and Apple Salad Peach Trifle; Sponge Cake Coffee Stewed Liver with Mushrooms-Melt 1 tablespoon Crisco and add 12 tablespoons flour. Brown by long slow cooking. Add salt and pepper and 2 cups water. Cook till as thick as good cream. Have 1 pound of calf's liver cut into 2-inch cubes. Pour boiling water over them and drain immediately. Drop these into brown sauce and cook slowly 10 or 12 minutes. They must not cook rapidly nor too long. In the meantime peel some mushrooms if they are fresh and require such treatment, and drop into melted Crisco and allow to simmer. Just before taking up liver add mushrooms.
A brown-sauce liver braise from Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar, dated September 4. Two things need attention before you start: the flour quantity as printed, and the fact that liver stops being tender the moment it is overcooked.
- The flour amount is a misprintOne tablespoon of fat to twelve of flour cannot be browned or thinned into a sauce with two cups of water. The intended proportion is almost certainly 1 to 2 tablespoons flour to 1 tablespoon fat, which with 2 cups water gives the thin "good cream" consistency described. Treat the printed 12 as unreliable.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, though reformulated with far less trans fat than the 1913 product. Any neutral solid shortening works; butter browns the roux faster and tastes better, at the cost of scorching more readily.
- Browning the roux"Long slow cooking" means a good ten to fifteen minutes over low heat, stirring, until the flour smells nutty and turns the color of weak coffee. Rushing it over high heat gives raw-flour flavor and specks of burn.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThe recipe repeats itself for good reason. Liver held at a bare simmer for 10 to 12 minutes stays tender; a rolling boil squeezes it into grey rubber in a couple of minutes. Keep the surface barely trembling.
- Why the boiling waterThe usual explanation for this step is that scalding and draining firms the surface and rinses off blood that would otherwise cloud and gray the sauce. Whatever the reason, it is not cooking the liver, so drain immediately as directed.
- Calf's liverStill available from butchers and worth seeking out; it is milder and finer-grained than beef liver. If you substitute beef liver, soak it in milk for an hour first, and expect a stronger flavor. Two-inch cubes are large by modern habit -- slice about 3/4 inch thick instead if you prefer.
- Peeling mushroomsAn obsolete step, and the recipe already treats it as conditional ('if they are fresh and require such treatment'). Cultivated buttons and creminis need only a wipe. Simmering them in fat until they give up their liquid and start to color takes 6 to 8 minutes.
- YieldOne pound of liver serves three, or four with mashed potato or rice to take the sauce.
- The titleThe heading on this page does not match the text, which is entirely the liver dish; the heading appears to have strayed from another entry.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new material: a hydrogenated vegetable shortening that behaved like lard but kept without refrigeration and carried no animal flavor. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a menu to every date of the year, which is why this entry is stamped September 4 -- early autumn, when mushrooms came in and organ meats were still an ordinary weeknight economy rather than a specialty. Liver in brown sauce belongs to a long line of nineteenth-century American and English braises built on a browned flour roux, the technique that turned cheap offal into something worth serving with a sauce; the Crisco angle is simply that the fat doing the browning was made from cottonseed oil rather than from a pig.