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Calf's Liver Larded (Pass strips of larding pork)
Pass strips of larding, pork, firm, white and fat and two inches long, in rows along the surface of a calf's liver. This must be done with a larding needle and the stitches must be about one-quarter of an inch deep, leaving the ends of the pork projecting equally above the surface. Lay the liver in a dripping pan on one-half ounce of carrot, onehalf ounce of onion, and one ounce of sliced salt pork. Add seasoning and such herbs as you like, and over all pour a gill of brown gravy. Cook in a moderate oven about an hour, add a half pint of gravy to the vegetables in the pan and strain over the liver.
A straightforward braise-roast of a whole calf's liver, written for a cook who owned a larding needle and kept brown gravy on hand. The technique survives; the equipment and the shopping list need translating.
- The hinge: do not overcook itAn hour in a moderate oven will take a whole calf's liver well past the point where it stays tender. Liver is done at about 145-150F internal, still faintly pink at the centre; beyond that it turns grainy and dry. Check with a thermometer from around 35 minutes and treat the hour as an outside limit for a large liver.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). The dish is half roast, half braise, so the pan liquid should barely bubble rather than spit.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The half pint added later is one cup.
- Larding porkFresh back fat or unsmoked fatback, cut into strips (lardons) about a quarter inch square. Supermarket bacon is cured and smoked and will read as bacon rather than as fat; ask a butcher for fatback or salt pork, and if using salt pork, soak it first to draw out some of the salt.
- The larding needleA hinged larding needle grips the strip and draws it through the surface of the meat. Without one, a thin boning knife will cut a channel you can push the fat into with the handle of a wooden spoon, or you can simply lay the strips over the top and secure them with butcher's twine. The point is to keep a very lean muscle basted from within.
- Brown gravyThe book assumes a pot of made brown sauce in the kitchen: stock thickened with a browned roux. Well-reduced beef or veal stock, lightly thickened, does the same job. Unthickened stock will work but will not glaze the liver.
- Weights of vegetablesHalf an ounce each of carrot and onion is small — roughly a tablespoon of each, diced. It is a flavour base for the pan juices, not a bed of vegetables; double it if you want more body in the strained sauce.
- Buying and yieldA whole calf's liver runs 3-4 lb and is a special order in most places; a 2 lb piece cut from one behaves the same way and serves six to eight. Slice across the grain and spoon the strained pan sauce over.
Larding — threading strips of fat through lean meat with a needle — was standard professional practice through the nineteenth century, when the animals sold for veal and game are often said to have been leaner and drier than what most butchers offer now, and it turns up in American household books of the 1890s and 1900s that were copying French service into domestic kitchens. Calf's liver held a rank that beef liver never did: it was pale, mild and expensive, treated as a dish for company rather than as economy meat, and roasting one whole with a coat of larding and a brown sauce was the grand version. The assumption that the cook has a gill of brown gravy already made is itself a period marker, from an era when a stockpot and a made sauce were the permanent foundations of the range rather than something bought in a carton.