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With Bacon

A dish of sliced liver cooked in bacon drippings, served with a browned flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

With Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Pour salted boiling water over the liver and let it stand for a few minutes.

  2. Drain the liver and slice it.

Cook and serve

  1. Crisp thin slices of bacon in a hot frying pan.

  2. Lay the crisped bacon around the edge of a platter or deep dish and keep the dish hot.

  3. Fry the liver in the drippings from the bacon.

  4. Place the liver in the middle of the dish.

  5. Pour a little boiling water into the frying pan.

  6. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  7. Thicken with browned flour.

  8. Pour the sauce over the liver or serve separately.

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. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Liver + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Liver + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Liver
Is the main component, cooked quickly so it stays tender and moist.
Bacon
Renders fat for frying the liver and its crisp slices add savory contrast.
Browned flour
Thickens the pan liquid into a sauce and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.

The step that matters

Fry the liver in the bacon drippings. Liver cooks fast and turns dry and grainy when overcooked. Frying it briefly over fairly high heat keeps the inside tender and moist.

“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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