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Liver Fried with Bacon

Liver slices fried with bacon, optionally garnished with onions, parsley, lemon, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Liver Fried with Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the dripping in a frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Dredge the liver slices in flour and fry them in the pan until cooked through.

  3. In the same pan, fry the rashers of bacon until crispy.

  4. Place the fried liver on a hot dish and top with the bacon.

  5. If desired, fry finely sliced onions until browned and place around the liver.

  6. Garnish with crisp parsley and lemon slices, or serve with melted butter or a butter‑flour sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Liver
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking to a tender, firm texture when fried.
Flour
Dredging coats the liver slices, helping them brown and form a crisp surface when fried.
Dripping
Fat for frying that conducts heat evenly and gives the liver a rich, browned surface.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky fat and crisp texture to the finished dish.

The step that matters

Fry the liver until cooked through. Liver turns from tender to grainy and dry if overcooked, so it should be cooked just through and served promptly.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, flour, parsley, lemon, butter, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, flour, parsley, lemon, butter, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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