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Sandwich (Saute half a chopped onion)
Saute half a chopped onion in butter until brown; add one-half dozen chicken livers, cover with seasoned chicken stock, and let simmer until tender; mash the livers fine and press through a sieve, season with salt, paprika, mustard, and a dash of curry powder. Put this paste in a cup, pour melted butter over top; when cold, remove the butter and cut in thin slices; place between thin slices of white bread. Garnish with a pickle.
This is a potted chicken liver spread, sliced rather than smeared. The whole thing turns on cooking the livers just to done and no further.
- QuantityHalf a dozen chicken livers is roughly 6 to 8 oz / 175 to 225 g, enough paste for a few thin sandwiches.
- Do not overcook the liversSimmered in stock they are done in about 5 to 8 minutes, when they are just cooked through with no pink left in the centre. Held much longer they turn grainy and chalky and no amount of sieving will fix the texture.
- The sieveA food processor does this in seconds, but the paste will still hold small membranous threads. Passing it through a fine sieve afterwards is what gives the sliceable, close-grained body the recipe is after.
- LiquidDrain the livers but keep the stock. The mashed paste is stiff, and a spoonful or two of the cooking liquid beaten back in brings it to a workable consistency before it sets.
- The butter sealPour over clarified butter if you can — the milk solids in whole butter sour first. The seal makes the paste keep a few days longer under refrigeration, but this is not a shelf-stable preserve; it belongs in the fridge from the moment it cools, and should be eaten within about four days.
- Slicing itChill for at least four hours in a straight-sided cup or small ramekin so it turns out as a clean cylinder. Slice with a hot dry knife; the paste softens fast in a warm room.
- SeasoningSeason the paste while it is still warm and taste it then — cold fat mutes salt considerably, so a mixture that seems correct straight from the fridge was under-seasoned going in.
Potting cooked meat under a cap of butter is an old English preserving method still in domestic use, and by the time this book appeared it had shifted from a way of keeping meat through the winter to a way of producing an elegant, sliceable sandwich filling. The curry powder and paprika mark the period as much as the technique does: both were standard pantry seasonings in Anglo-American cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, curry powder often said to have been used as a general warming note rather than as any particular gesture toward Indian cookery. Chicken livers were a natural candidate for the treatment, and available in quantity wherever poultry was being dressed at home or at the butcher's. The instruction to cut the potted paste in thin slices, rather than spread it, suggests a tea-table standard: sandwiches meant to look neat on a plate and hold their shape until eaten.