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Liver and Bacon

A dish of sliced calf's liver fried with bacon, garnished with parsley and lemon, served with butter or butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Liver and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the dripping in a frying pan over medium‑high heat.

  2. Dredge the liver slices in flour and fry them in the pan until cooked through.

  3. Fry the bacon until crispy.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the liver on a hot dish and top with the bacon.

  2. Garnish with crisp parsley and sliced lemon.

  3. Serve with melted butter or a sauce made from butter and flour.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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

Calf's liver
Main protein; flour coating helps it brown while the inside stays tender when cooked through.
Dripping
Cooking fat that conducts heat evenly and adds savoury richness to the liver and pan.
Bacon
Renders fat and crisps, adding salty, smoky browning and contrasting texture to the liver.
Flour
Dry coating that promotes browning on the liver surface and helps form a light crust.

The step that matters

Cooking the liver through. Liver turns dry and grainy when overcooked, while undercooked liver is unsafe to eat. Thin slices cook quickly, so checking doneness closely in the hot fat matters.

“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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