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Potted Liver
One and one-half pounds beef's liver, in one piece boiled an hour and a half, with one bay leaf and half an onion. Save one cupful of liquor. When cold grate liver, add to the liquor when boiling one-half cupful butter, one tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, one-half teaspoonful nutmeg, one-half teaspoonful cloves; let it boil up, add to the liver with half teaspoonful of salt, and one-quarter teaspoonful of cayenne; pack in tumblers and pour melted butter over the top. This is a fine lunch relish with bread and butter.
A straightforward potted liver for sandwiches. The technique is sound; the main adjustments are texture, seasoning balance, and how long you can keep it.
- Grating cooked liver"Grate" here means reducing the cold, firm boiled liver to a coarse powder on a box grater — that is what gives potted meat its characteristic dry, crumbly body. A food processor works, but pulse rather than run it, or you get paste.
- Boil it long, and cold is not optionalNinety minutes of simmering is deliberate: the liver must be dry and firm enough to grate. It also has to be fully cold, or it will smear instead of shred. Cook it a day ahead.
- Spice quantitiesHalf a teaspoon each of nutmeg and cloves in 1.5 lb of liver is assertive by current taste, and the cloves in particular dominate. Start with a quarter teaspoon of each and adjust once the mixture is mixed and cooled.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of modern cayenne may be hotter than the ground red pepper the recipe assumes, since ground spice bought loose loses pungency in storage. Add half, taste, then decide.
- The butter sealThe melted butter poured over the top is an oxygen barrier, not a preservative in any modern sense. It slows discoloration and keeps the surface from drying; it does nothing about bacterial growth.
- StorageTreat this as a fresh spread: refrigerated, covered, and eaten within three or four days. Potted meats of this era were often kept in a cool larder for considerably longer, which is not a standard to copy.
- TumblersStraight-sided drinking glasses were commonly used for potting, as here. Small jars or ramekins do the same job; pack firmly to expel air pockets before sealing with butter.
- YieldAbout 3 cups, enough for roughly two dozen small sandwiches or a large crock for a buffet.
Potting — cooking meat down, seasoning it hard, packing it tight and sealing it under a layer of clarified fat — is one of the oldest English preservation methods to survive into the age of refrigeration, and among its uses was the making of sandwiches. In the later nineteenth century the sandwich had become a fixture of the ladies' lunch, the picnic hamper and the railway journey, and cookbooks of the period give attention to spreadable fillings that would hold up for a few hours away from the ice box. Beef liver was among the cheapest protein in the market, and the heavy hand with cloves, nutmeg, cayenne and Worcestershire is doing double duty: masking the mineral edge of liver and supplying the sharp "relish" flavor that Victorian palates expected from anything served with plain bread and butter. Worcestershire itself, commercially bottled since the 1830s, appears constantly in American cookbooks of this generation as a shortcut to savory depth.