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Liver and Bacon
Saute the liver in a little bacon fat which is on hand and when done make a little gravy from it with flour and hot water. Heat a clean pan, drop in slices of bacon of wafer-like thickness. If the pan is very hot they will curl up into rolls and by turning with a fork will be brown in a few minutes. Arrange round the liver and add a garnish of parsley.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century books, where the writer assumes you already know the dish and only need reminding of the order of operations. The details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether it works.
- The hinge: do not overcook the liverLiver goes from tender to grainy and metallic in under a minute. Slices about 3/8 inch thick want roughly 2 minutes a side over medium-high heat, until the surface is browned and the centre just faintly rosy. The recipe's "when done" is the trap.
- Which liverAn unqualified "liver" may mean calf's, lamb's or beef liver; calf's is the mildest and was the most expensive, beef the strongest and coarsest, lamb's between the two. Pull off the outer membrane and any tubes before slicing, or the pieces will buckle in the pan.
- Bacon fat on handThe recipe presumes a crock of rendered drippings by the stove. Two tablespoons is enough. If you have none, cook the bacon first and use its fat, though you will then need to rewarm the bacon or accept it soft.
- The gravy, in numbersFor pan gravy from the liver fond: about 1 tablespoon flour stirred into the hot fat, cooked a minute, then 3/4 to 1 cup hot water whisked in. No seasoning is mentioned anywhere in the original; it needs salt and pepper, and a little of the bacon fat improves it.
- Wafer-thin baconAsk for the thinnest cut available, or the slices will render rather than curl. A very hot dry pan and constant turning is what produces the rolls the recipe describes.
- YieldReckon on 4 to 6 oz of liver and two rashers per person; a pound of liver serves three to four.
- An optional old habitSoaking the slices in milk for half an hour and patting them dry is a traditional way to mellow the flavour of stronger livers. It is not in the text, but it does soften beef liver noticeably.
Liver and bacon is one of the oldest partnerships in English and American cooking, and it survives on simple logic: liver is lean, quick-cooking and prone to dryness, while bacon supplies both the fat to fry it in and the salt to season it. Organ meats were cheap and perishable, sold and eaten the day an animal was killed, and calf's liver in particular fetched more at the butcher's than beef liver, which was the household economy cut. The style of the entry is characteristic of the period: no quantities, no times, no seasoning, only a sequence of reminders for a cook already fluent in the work.