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Calf's Liver Larded

A liver larded with fat salt pork, baked with carrots, turnip, onion, and buttered paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Calf's Liver Larded

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Wash the liver in cold water and trim off loose pieces, but leave the skin intact.

  2. Insert the larding needle into the liver, taking a stitch in the meat and working it back and forth 2 or 3 times.

  3. Insert a strip of pork into the forked end of the needle and pull it through, leaving about ½ inch on each side.

  4. Dot the entire surface of the liver with the pork strips.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the liver on a bed of pork scraps, carrot, turnip, and onion in a baking pan.

  2. Cover with buttered paper and bake until nearly done, then remove the paper to brown the pork strips.

  3. Rub the vegetables through a sieve and use the drippings from the pan to make a sauce or gravy.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Liver + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  5. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's liver
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked gently until tender under cover.
Salt pork fat
Larded strips add moisture and richness as they melt into the lean liver.
Onion
Flavors the pan drippings, adding aroma that carries into the sauce or gravy.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the pan base, thickening the sauce when sieved.
Turnip
Contributes mild sweetness and body to the vegetable base for the sauce.

The step that matters

Removing the paper to brown the pork strips. Covering keeps the liver moist while it cooks through; uncovering near the end lets surface heat brown the fat strips. Leaving the cover on too long leaves the pork pale and the liver steaming rather than browned.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, pork, turnip, onion, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, pork, turnip, onion, butter. 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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