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Fried Calfs Liver and Bacon

A dish of sliced calf liver and bacon fried together, finished with a lemon‑flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Calfs Liver and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Slice the calf's liver and bacon thinly.

  2. Fry the bacon until cooked but not burnt. Keep the bacon warm on a hot dish.

  3. Fry the liver slices until done.

  4. On a hot dish, layer bacon and liver slices alternately until full.

Make the sauce

  1. Add lemon peel to the bacon drippings.

  2. Sprinkle flour over the mixture.

  3. Moisten with hot stock and white wine if desired.

  4. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  5. Stir until smooth and brown.

  6. Remove the lemon peel.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the liver and bacon.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. White wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Calf's liver
Main protein; it is cooked briefly so it stays tender and does not toughen.
Bacon
Its rendered fat cooks the liver and forms the base of the sauce, adding savoury flavour.
Flour
Browns in the bacon drippings and thickens the sauce as it is moistened.
Hot stock
Liquid that dissolves the browned flour and turns the mixture into a pourable sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich liver, bacon and sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the liver slices until done. Calf's liver is lean and cooks quickly; overcooking makes it dry and grainy, while undercooking leaves it unpleasantly soft in the centre. Frying thin slices briefly keeps it tender.

“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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