Liver Soup
(Poland.) Cut 1/2 pound of liver into slices, add flour,--a spoonful,--1 ounce of butter and 1 onion, cut fine. Fry this and then pound it, add three slices of stale bread, in crumbs, salt, and pepper and 3 pints of brown stock. Boil 20 minutes, press through a sieve, add yolk of 1 egg and some chopped parsley, and serve at once.
A thickened liver purée in the old style, closer to a liaison-bound potage than to anything served today. The whole dish turns on two points: not overcooking the liver, and not letting the egg yolk boil.
- The egg yolkWhisk the yolk with a ladleful of the hot strained soup, then stir that back into the pot off the heat. Added directly it will scramble into threads and the soup will look curdled.
- Liver choice and cookingCalf's or chicken liver both work; the recipe's "brown stock" implies veal or beef bones. Fry the slices only until the outside is coloured and the centre still rosy, since they get twenty more minutes in the stock and long-cooked liver turns grainy and metallic.
- "Pound it"This means a mortar, to a coarse paste. A food processor does the same job in seconds; pulse rather than purée, as the sieve at the end is what gives the smooth texture.
- Three pintsAn American pint of 16 fl oz gives 6 cups, about 1.4 litres. If you are working from a British edition, imperial pints would give closer to 1.7 litres, so start with 6 cups and thin to taste.
- The breadStale bread crumbs are the thickener here, alongside the spoonful of flour. Use a dry, plain white loaf; commercial dried crumbs are too fine and packaged panko too airy to give the same body.
- Pressing through a sieveA conical strainer and a ladle, or a food mill, will get you there. Push the solids hard, as a good deal of the body and flavour is in the pulp; what stays behind is largely fibre and crust.
- Reheat carefullyOnce the yolk is in, hold the soup below a simmer. "Serve at once" is not decoration; the liaison breaks on standing and reheating.
- YieldSix cups of stock and half a pound of liver serve four as a first course, three as a light supper.
This is one of the short national entries in Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902), a collection that gathered household dishes from across Europe and beyond for American cooks, each tagged with its country of origin. Liver soups of this kind are often said to have been common across Poland, the Austro-Hungarian lands and the German states, where liver was cheap, quick-cooking and traditionally regarded as a strengthening food for invalids and convalescents. The method — fry, pound, bind with breadcrumbs, sieve, finish with an egg yolk — is the standard nineteenth-century purée soup framework, applied to almost any meat or vegetable in turn; comparable instructions with game or lentils in place of liver are said to turn up in period cookbooks. Keen's attributions are broad rather than documented, so the "(Poland.)" should be read as a general regional label rather than evidence of a specific Polish source.