Home › Sandwiches › Chicken Livers
Chicken Livers
Remove the gall bag carefully from twelve livers, wash them well, drain and scald; then wipe dry. Put into the chafing dish a tablespoonful of butter, toss the livers in it three minutes and add a gill of white wine. Chop a dozen fresh mushrooms very fine, add them to the dish; season with salt and pepper; cover, reduce the heat, simmer ten minutes longer and serve.
A chafing-dish preparation filed among the sandwich fillings, which tells you it was meant to be spooned hot onto toast at a late supper. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes; the only real risk is overcooking the livers.
- A gill of white wineA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Any dry white will do; the wine reduces with the mushroom liquid into the sauce that binds the filling.
- The gall bagModern supermarket livers are almost always trimmed already, but check each lobe for a greenish stain or a small attached sac and cut it away generously. Gall is intensely bitter and will ruin the whole pan.
- Scald, then wipe dryThe original scalds the livers to firm them and rinse off blood. It is optional now; what matters is the wiping. Wet livers steam rather than sear.
- Watch the timingThirteen minutes total is more than chicken livers want. Toss them in butter until browned outside and still rosy at the centre, then add wine and mushrooms and simmer only until the liquid thickens, four or five minutes. Livers cooked through to grey turn chalky and grainy.
- A chafing dishA tabletop pan over a spirit lamp, giving gentle heat. A heavy skillet on the stove is the equivalent; use medium-high for the initial toss, then low once the wine goes in.
- The mushroomsA dozen small fresh mushrooms is roughly 6 oz. Chopped fine as directed, they release liquid quickly and help make the mixture spreadable.
- YieldTwelve livers is about 1 lb and fills six to eight sandwiches, or covers that many rounds of toast. Season assertively at the end; liver takes more salt than it seems to.
Chafing-dish cookery was fashionable around the time this book was compiled: a spirit lamp and a metal pan let a hostess cook at the table after the theatre or a card party, without waking the kitchen staff. Chicken livers, cheap and quick, were a standard of the genre, along with welsh rarebit, creamed oysters and lobster Newburg. That this appears under sandwiches may reflect a looser sense of the word — a hot savoury mixture heaped on toast could be called a sandwich as readily as anything between two slices of bread, and such dishes were common at the late supper and the ladies' luncheon alike. The instruction to remove the gall bag suggests that livers might still arrive attached to a whole bird from the poulterer rather than trimmed in a tub.