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Fried Liver and Bacon

Fried liver and bacon is a savory dish of beef liver cooked in bacon fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,759 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Fried Liver and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the liver in milk or scald it with boiling water to draw out the blood.

  2. Dry the liver thoroughly and sprinkle it with flour.

Cook

  1. Fry the bacon until crisp, then remove it from the pan.

  2. In the hot bacon fat, fry the liver until browned on both sides.

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. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + livertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together431 recipes

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

  4. Liver + milktop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

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

  5. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Beef liver
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked to a firm, browned texture.
Milk
Soaking in milk draws out blood, which mellows the liver's strong flavour and colour.
Flour
Dusting dry liver with flour helps it brown and form a light crust in the fat.
Bacon
Its rendered fat cooks the liver, adding savoury, smoky flavour and browning.

The step that matters

Dry the liver thoroughly before flouring. Surface moisture turns flour into a paste instead of a crisp, browned crust and can cause the liver to steam and splatter in the fat rather than sear.

“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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