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To Stuff a Calf's Liver

A stuffed calf liver cooked in water with bread crumbs, onion, herbs, pickled pork, and a gravy thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Summer savory and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 241 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Stuff a Calf's Liver

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Remove all veins from the underside of the liver and make deep incisions on the other side.

  2. Mix the bread crumbs, onion, summer savory, parsley, salt, black pepper, and mace together.

  3. Carefully stuff the mixture into the incisions and skewer tightly.

Cook and serve

  1. Season the liver with pepper and dredge with flour, placing the pickled pork slices on top.

  2. Place the liver in a pan with 1 pint of water and baste well for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the liver from the pan, thicken the gravy with browned flour, and add allspice and wine to taste.

  4. Pour the gravy over the liver and serve very hot.

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. Summer savory + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Summer savory + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + summer savorytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together299 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's liver
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the stuffing while it bastes.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the stuffing so it holds together inside the incisions.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, savory fat that flavors the liver as it cooks beneath it.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy and adds toasted flavor.

The step that matters

Baste the liver for the full cooking time. Liver is lean and dries out and toughens quickly with high heat or overcooking. Steady basting in the water keeps the surface moist while the interior cooks through.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, bread, onion, summer savory, parsley, pepper, pork):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, bread, onion, summer savory, parsley, pepper, pork. 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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