Home › Meat › Calf's Liver and Bacon Sandwich
Calf's Liver and Bacon Sandwich
Calf's liver well cooked and chopped fine, slices of bacon fried crisp and chopped fine; season with salt and pepper and a dash of catsup. Mix and place on thin slices of lightly buttered graham or white bread, with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A filling built from two cooked components, so the only real variables are how far you take the liver and how fine you chop it. The original assumes you have leftovers from a hot dinner.
- Don't overcook the liverThe recipe says "well cooked," i.e. cooked through. Sliced calf's liver needs only a few minutes a side, until firm; past that it turns chalky and no amount of catsup will bring it back.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Roughly 8 oz liver to 4 rashers of bacon fills six to eight sandwiches, and that ratio is worth keeping — the bacon is the seasoning as much as the salt is.
- Chopping, not grindingChop by hand with a knife. A food processor turns cooked liver to paste in seconds, and the whole point of the mixture is a coarse crumb held together by bacon fat.
- Bind it if it won't holdChopped liver and bacon alone will crumble out of the bread. A spoonful of the warm bacon fat stirred in as it cools, or a little softened butter, gives it enough body to spread.
- CatsupPeriod tomato catsup was thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than the modern bottle. A dash of today's ketchup plus a few drops of vinegar or Worcestershire is closer to the intended effect.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, unsifted. A dense wholemeal or a good wheat sandwich loaf stands in; the recipe wants thin slices, so a firm-crumbed bread cuts better than an airy one.
- ServingAssemble close to eating. Placing the lettuce leaf between filling and bread would also have helped keep the fat from soaking in, and that effect is lost once the leaf wilts.
Sandwich books proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1920, and they share a habit of treating yesterday's dinner as today's filling. Liver and bacon was a standard cheap dinner-plate pairing — calf's liver being the mild, expensive end of the offal trade, ranked well above beef or pork liver — and turning the remains into a chopped sandwich spread follows the same logic as potted meats and deviled ham of the same decade. The lettuce leaf laid between filling and bread is a small mark of the period's fussiness about sandwiches for ladies' luncheons.