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1st Lesson. New Style of Dressing Liver in Frying-pan

A fried ox liver dish cooked with bacon, onions, parsley, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

1st Lesson. New Style of Dressing Liver in Frying-pan

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Remove the sinew and veins from the ox liver.

  2. Cut the liver into long slices, half an inch thick.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Heat the dripping in a frying pan.

  2. Add three pieces of liver at a time to the hot fat until set.

  3. Cut the bacon into small dice and fry in the fat.

  4. Dice the cooked liver and add it to the bacon.

  5. Stir in the chopped onions, parsley, flour, salt, and pepper.

  6. Gradually add the water, stirring until the mixture thickens.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Liver + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,420 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox liver
Forms the main body of the dish and cooks to a firm, set texture when fried.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices and fat into a smoother, binding sauce.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky fat that flavours the mixture as it fries.
Dripping
Conducts heat for frying and carries flavour into the liver and bacon.

The step that matters

Add the liver to hot fat in small batches. Crowding the pan cools the fat, so the liver steams instead of searing. Hot fat sets the surface quickly, keeping the slices tender inside.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, parsley, flour, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, parsley, flour, pepper. 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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