Home › Meat › Chicken Liver Sandwich
Chicken Liver Sandwich
Boil chicken liver until tender and rub through a sieve; mix with an equal amount of olives chopped fine, and mayonnaise dressing; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A three-line filling that assumes you already have the livers, the olives and a bowl of homemade mayonnaise on hand. The only real technique is not overcooking the liver.
- Cook the liver briefly"Until tender" is a short window: simmer whole livers in salted water or stock 5 to 7 minutes, until firm and just cooked through with no pink at the centre. Boiled longer they turn grainy and metallic, and no amount of mayonnaise will smooth them out.
- Skip the sieveRubbing cooked liver through a sieve was the usual way to get a fine paste when this was written. A food processor or a few minutes with a fork does much the same job; sieve only if you want it perfectly silky.
- Which olivesThe recipe says only "olives"; brine-cured green olives are the likeliest reading. Drain and blot them well or the filling weeps into the bread. Equal parts olive to liver is aggressively salty by current taste.
Chicken livers were an economy ingredient in the era of the whole-bird butcher: every roasting fowl came with its giblets, and a cook with a few livers and no plan for them found a home in the sandwich filling or the savoury. Sandwich books proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1920, driven by the bridge party, the picnic hamper and the afternoon tea table, and their structure is often much the same — a cooked or potted protein, a chopped sharp element, and mayonnaise to bind, spread between thin white bread. Olives appear constantly in these collections, and their brine served the same function that lemon or capers do in a modern liver pâté, cutting the richness of the offal.