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Although it is never going to make a list
of health foods, for a lot of people, chopped liver is a comfort
food, a tradition from childhood, relatives made it,
particularly at holiday times. Doyle encountered it at a New
York-style deli in Vernon, CT, where he had a terrific chopped
liver sandwich.
WENDY’S CHOPPED LIVER
- 1 lb. beef liver
(chicken is just as good)
- 5 hard boiled
eggs, whites only (give the yolks to the dog mixed with the
liver drippings)
- 1 lb. chopped
onions
- 2 tablespoons
schmaltz
- salt and pepper
Chop the egg whites in the food
processor and put into a bowl. Chop the onions in a food
processor and fry them and put them in the bowl. Broil the
liver and cut it into pieces and chop it briefly in the food
processor. This works as well as my old hand chopper. If
you’re using the hand method, one simple speed-up is to use
a small strainer and force the hard boiled egg through it
twice; use your fingers; it allows the egg to get mixed
faster and better.
You can buy schmaltz here in town.
Schmaltz is chicken fat, an essential part of the recipe.
A caller contributed this recipe found in an
old family recipe book:
CHOPPED LIVER PASTE
- ˝ lb. chicken or
beef liver
- 1 large onion
sliced fine
- 1 cup chicken fat
- 6 hard boiled eggs
- slice of raw onion
for garnish
Fry onion and liver gently in the fat.
When cool, put through a food grinder with egg and raw onion
using the flat knife. Salt and pepper to taste. Add more
chicken fat for a richer paste.
Doyle makes this pâté with a friend:
LIVER PÂTÉ
(MORE COMPLEX)
- Ham
- Liver
- Butter (lots)
- Parsley
- Onions
Sautée all the ingredients until well
cooked. Then grind into a fine paste. Add cognac or
bourbon.
Recipes for chopped liver you find on
the web are typically remembered from the cooking of
people’s grandmothers. Many of these grandmothers’ recipes
don’t use chicken livers, but nowadays chicken livers are
always fresh whereas other types of liver are frozen or old
and aren’t quite as tasty. There are also vegetarian “mock”
chopped liver recipes using lentils, mushrooms, peas.
A listener from Champaign reported that his
family used to have chopped liver every week as part of the
Sabbath meal. It was always chicken liver (although vegetable
substitutes could be used for dairy meals, made with string
beans); they ate calf liver, but never for chopped liver. The
chicken livers were always roasted directly on the fire, on a
metal wire contraption on the stove. They would add gribenes,
which is rendered chicken fat; and raw onions would be chopped
and added in. There was a separate dish where onion and livers
were fried together, but that was a different dish. The chopped
liver had some salt, and sometimes hard boiled eggs (but
sometimes not). It was all done according to taste rather than
a recipe. When mixed together, it was chopped by hand with a
rounded bottom rocker (a mezzaluna) in a wooden bowl. You could
probably make do without the rendered chicken fat, it would be
less intense. Although the livers were salted and roasted on
the outside, they were still soft on the inside (but not pink).
A recipe for gribenes can be found at
http://www.leitesculinaria.com/recipes/cookbook/gribenes.html
Chicken fat is also good on bread, also
with a little garlic rubbed on the bread.
Another caller identified the word on the
deli menu as “fresser”, a person who keeps eating and sampling
food. The cooking of the liver isn’t really roasting, it’s
actually broiling, on a wire rack over the stove, so that the
blood would drain down. Making chicken fat is simple: take the
skin off the chicken, put it in a pan until the fat melts off.
The gribenes is actually the cracklings, the skin; you eat both
the schmaltz (fat) and the gribenes.
A caller from Champaign asked if there was
a place you can get chopped liver already made locally. No one
called in with a response.
The web site Epicurious is always a good
place to look for recipes. When you search for chopped liver
there, 81 recipes pop up immediately, including “The Amazing
Low-Fat Chopped Liver” from Healthy Jewish Cooking, which you
can find at
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/104029
Every family has its own tradition. Some
people insist you must hand chop it so that it remains a little
bit grainy. Others say you can use the Cuisinart so that it is
beautifully smooth. The color is not particularly exciting.
A caller urged listeners not to be so
worried about the healthiness of the liver and eggs and chicken
fat. She cited the work of the Weston A. Price Foundation in
Washington or Sally Fallon’s cookbook. People shouldn’t worry
about cholesterol and animal fats, indigenous diets full of such
things result in healthier people. Information is available at
http://www.westonaprice.org/
Sally Fallon’s cookbook is called Nourishing Tradition. Liver and eggs are the two most
nutritious things you can eat. Moderation in all things leads
to a healthy diet.
Another caller reported that Carson’s Rib
House on Wells Street in Chicago always had a big bowl of
chopped chicken livers; he didn’t know whether it was an
“official” type of chopped liver, but there would be a little
bowl of chopped onion and some capers to add to it, and some
crackers. It was a great way to ruin the appetite while waiting
to get a table.
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