It took an awfully long time for me to find a recipe for a calve's liver dish that I liked. As was the case with many of us, my mom made it from time to time, a big slab of strange-looking, strange-smelling, strangely-textured strangeness that nobody wanted to eat. But this one I liked a lot, and I and my friend Andy both took additional helpings.
I had to try this recipe because it's a Venetian classic, and how could it become a classic if it were at all like what my mom made?
The differences in this dish are twofold, one part of the recipe and the other was the liver itself.
I decided a long time ago that I did not trust liver from cattle raised on factory farms fed who knows what feed and drugs, because all of that ultimately is processed by the liver. I found some Caldwell Farms calf liver at the Belfast Coop in Belfast, Maine. I knew it was going to be as good a piece of liver as I am likely to find, so I bought it for this recipe.
The recipe insists that the liver be sliced very thinly before cooking. Andy and I agreed that this was a major improvement, getting past the worst of the texture strangeness, ensuring all of it was cooked through but not overdone, and enabling tastes of the liver to go along with the onions in a pleasing way. I will make this again, when I can get the good liver.