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Calf's Liver Sandwich
Chop cooked calf's liver fine, add crisp fried bacon chopped fine. Season with salt and pepper, add a dash of catsup; mix and place on lettuce leaves between thin slices of buttered white bread.
A liver-and-bacon filling of the kind hotel kitchens made from yesterday's cooked meat. The whole thing depends on the liver being cooked properly in the first place and the mixture being moist enough to hold together.
- Start with the liverThe recipe assumes you already have cooked calf's liver on hand. If you don't, slice it about 1/2 inch thick, dust with seasoned flour and cook quickly in butter or bacon fat, 2 to 3 minutes a side, until just firm and no longer red inside. Liver cooked past that point turns grainy and metallic, and chopping does not disguise it.
- Chop, don't process"Chop fine" means a knife or a coarse grind. A food processor turns liver into a grey paste that goes pasty in the mouth; leave visible texture and small flecks of bacon.
- ProportionsNone are given. About 3 parts chopped liver to 1 part bacon by volume is a workable balance, roughly 6 oz cooked liver and 3 or 4 rashers, enough for four sandwiches.
- Catsup then and nowPeriod tomato catsup was often thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced than modern ketchup, which tends to be sweeter. Use a scant teaspoon, or substitute a little tomato paste with a few drops of vinegar if you want the acidity without the sugar.
- BindingLiver and bacon alone are dry and crumbly. A tablespoon of softened butter, mayonnaise or a spoonful of the bacon fat worked into the mixture will hold it on the bread without reading as a change to the recipe.
- The buttered bread mattersButter both cut faces right to the edges. It is the only barrier between a damp filling and thin white bread, and the lettuce leaf does the same job for the other slice.
- KeepingChopped cooked liver spoils faster than most sandwich fillings. Mix it the day it is served, keep it refrigerated, and do not hold made-up sandwiches at room temperature through an afternoon.
Sandwich books of the 1900s and 1910s were partly manuals of thrift: a great many entries begin with the assumption that a cooked chop, a cold roast or a piece of liver is sitting in the larder and must be turned into something for tea, a picnic hamper or a lunch box. Calf's liver was the prestige liver of the period, milder and paler than beef or pig, and it was sold fresh because organ meats did not travel or keep. Pairing it with bacon is older than the sandwich itself; the fat compensates for liver's dryness, and the combination shows up in English and American cookery as liver and bacon long before anyone thought to put it between buttered bread. The catsup is a period signature, standing in for the whole bottled-condiment shelf that Victorian and Edwardian cooks used to sharpen bland cold meat.