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Liver Patties
Liver patties are made by steaming or boiling half of a pound of lamb's or calf's liver, chopping it fine, seasoning well with salt, pepper, catsup and Worcestershire, adding a little thick brown sauce and serving in hot patty shells.
A brief entry that assumes you already know how to make brown sauce and patty shells. The one thing to get right is the liver itself: it is done the moment it loses its raw redness, and every minute past that turns it chalky.
- Cook the liver brieflyHalf a pound of calf's or lamb's liver in a covered steamer or barely simmering water needs roughly 8 to 12 minutes, depending on thickness. Cook it through to a uniform pale brown but no further; boiled hard, liver goes dry and grainy and no amount of sauce fixes it.
- Patty shellsThese are puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases, not the American "patty" meaning a ground-meat cake and not a pie shell. Frozen vol-au-vent cases baked at 400F work; so do rounds cut from a sheet of puff pastry, scored and hollowed after baking.
- Thick brown sauceIn a period kitchen this means a roux-based espagnole or a reduced meat gravy, not commercial gravy granules. About 1/4 cup for half a pound of liver should be enough to bind the mince without making it soupy.
- CatsupTomato catsup was the usual bottling by this period, though mushroom and walnut catsups were still made; period catsups were generally thinner and sharper than modern ketchup, which is noticeably sweeter, so start with a teaspoon and taste before adding more.
- Chopping"Chopping it fine" means knife-minced to a coarse, still-textured hash. A food processor will take it to paste in a few seconds, which makes a liver spread rather than patties.
- YieldHalf a pound of liver with sauce fills about four standard 3-inch shells, enough for four as a first course or light lunch. Fill the shells only at the moment of serving or the pastry softens.
- Why it sits among sandwichesThe mixture also works cold as a sandwich filling, which is presumably how it reached this section; served hot in pastry it is essentially a savoury entrée.
Hot fillings served in small puff-pastry cases were a staple of late-Victorian and Edwardian entertaining, useful because the shells could be baked ahead and filled at the last minute for a luncheon, supper or card party. Organ meats were then everyday food rather than a specialty: calf's and lamb's liver were cheap and widely available, and cookbooks of the period treat them as ordinary household protein. The pairing of catsup and Worcestershire is common in American cookbooks of this era, when bottled sauces had become cheap enough to use freely. The vagueness of the instructions is typical of the genre: brown sauce and patty shells were assumed to be already in the cook's repertoire, so only the variable part of the dish needed writing down.