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Livers of Poultry

A stew of turkey and chicken livers simmered with gravy, mushrooms, ketchup, and butter, seasoned with pepper and salt, garnished with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Livers of Poultry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the livers

  1. Soak the livers of the turkey and fowls in cold water for a short time.

  2. Remove the fowl livers from the water.

Make the sauce

  1. Place them in a pan.

  2. Add gravy, mushrooms, ketchup, and butter to the pan.

  3. Season with pepper and salt.

  4. Stew gently for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Boil the turkey's liver until cooked.

  2. Place it in the center of a serving dish.

  3. Arrange the stewed livers around the turkey liver.

  4. Pour the sauce over.

  5. Garnish with lemon.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Turkey + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together205 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Livers
Form the main body of the dish, with a soft, rich texture when cooked gently.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base of the sauce and keeps the livers moist during stewing.
Mushrooms
Add an earthy, savory flavor to the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness, tang, and a deeper colour to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness, and with the flour coating it helps thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 10 minutes. Liver cooks quickly and proteins tighten with prolonged or vigorous heat, so overcooking makes it dry, tough, and grainy. Keep the heat gentle and watch the time.

“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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