Calf's liver and bacon

Calf's liver and bacon is a savoury dish containing veal (calf's liver) and pork (bacon). It is found in British recipes from the eighteenth century and has become popular in anglophone countries, though less so in French and Italian cuisine.

Calf's liver and bacon

Calf's liver and bacon with mashed potatoes, red cabbage, carrots, and onion gravy
Place of origin	Britain
Main ingredients	liver, bacon

Most modern recipes differ from those of 1733 and 1780 in specifying that the bacon is fried first and the liver is then sautéed in the bacon fat before the two ingredients are combined and served. In a nineteenth-century American variant the liver and bacon are baked in an oven and served with a cream sauce.

History

A recipe for the dish is given in Sara Harrison's The House-keeper's Pocket Book, published in London in 1733.^[1] Her recipe was reproduced, with more detailed cooking instructions, in Eliza Price's The New Book of Cookery, or, Every Woman a Perfect Cook in 1780.^[2] The dish is featured in several English cookery books of the nineteenth century, including Cookery Made Easy (1825),^[3] and The Domestic Oracle (1826).^[4] It appears in cookery books from Ireland (1825),^[5] Scotland (1826),^[6] the US (1857),^[7] and Australia (1864).^[8] In the first edition of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861), it is mentioned five times in different suggested menus.^[9]

Eighteenth-century recipes for the dish

Xavier Raskin, in his 1922 The French Chef in Private American Families, suggested that the dish was French in origin,^[10] but bacon (lard maigre fumé) does not play a large part in traditional French cookery,^[11] and according to Larousse Gastronomique, calf's liver with bacon is known in France as "English style" – foie de veau à l'anglaise.^{[12][n 1]} Auguste Escoffier included it under that name in his Le guide culinaire (1903).^[16]

Calf's liver (fegato di vitello) is much featured in Italian cooking, but neither Elizabeth David in Italian Food (1954) nor Gillian Riley in The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (2009) includes bacon in any liver dish mentioned.^[17] Nonetheless, in the US and Britain, calf's liver with bacon (or with guanciale, an approximate equivalent) is on the menu in some Italian restaurants.^[18]

For at least one American restaurant, calf's liver and bacon became a signature dish: in 1925, the Homestead Tea Room in St. Petersburg, Florida, took out a full-page press advertisement extolling its version of the dish.^[19] Although usually a lunch or dinner dish, calf's liver and bacon was sometimes served as a breakfast dish, both for upper-class house parties in Britain and in American hotels.^[20]

Preparation

The essentials of the dish have not changed since Sara Harrison's 1733 recipe: slices of bacon and slices of calf's liver (often covered in flour) are fried separately. Early recipes suggest frying the liver first and then the bacon; later recipes recommend frying the bacon first and then cooking the liver in the residual fat. The bacon and slices of liver are placed in a dish and possibly covered with a gravy.^[12][16][21] Two modern textbooks for trainee chefs recommend either beurre noisette or jus lié.^[13] But in The White House Cook Book (1887), Hugo Ziemann and Fanny Gillette, give an alternative: the raw sliced liver has boiling water poured over it and is then put in a pan with slices of salt pork or bacon, pepper and salt and is baked in an oven and served with a cream or milk gravy poured over it.^[22] Some recipes suggest garnishing with parsley; Marco Pierre White recommends deep-fried sage leaves instead.^[23]

It is important that the dish is served quickly, as the liver ought to be eaten when hot and tender.^[24]

According to a 2014 cookery book, a serving of calf's liver and bacon typically contains 233 calories, 23 g protein, 10 g carbohydrate, 11 g total fat (4 g saturated fat), 358 mg cholesterol and 331 mg sodium.^[21]