Cooking What Your Mother Tells You

My mother has long insisted on the theory that the cheapest (and best) way to feed yourself is to eat mostly chicken liver. My reaction was always one of mild disgust followed by dismissal. Not that there's anything wrong with liver - I've always liked pate; but the memory of reaching into my lunch box and pulling out a bag of liver-and-onion flavored potato chips to resounding "ews" from my classmates scarred me into rejecting any kind of advocation of liver coming from my mother. However, some recent events compelled me to follow her characteristically English suggestion for the first time.

A few nights ago, I had dinner at the Atlantic Chip Shop, a pub that serves fish and chips, meat pies, and offers a full English breakfast in the morning. Although the people who run it are clearly in no way English, the food is right and they know enough to list a Snakebite on their drinks menu. I went with my cousin Talei, who had recently returned from a trip to Ohio to visit her boyfriend’s hometown and witness the phenomenon that is the Ohio State Fair. She was extremely impressed by this butter cow she saw there, and I suppose she thought it was time to reciprocate the cultural exchange and introduce Adam to her people’s food.

On the whole, there’s nothing too complex about the aesthetics of English cooking. The basic tenets are that things taste good when they contain large amounts of butter, frying is an ideal method of cooking, and most things on your plate should fall into either the Meat or Potato category, so as not to over-complicate things. These were the concepts that went into making my fried fish, Adam’s shepherd’s pie, and Talei’s sausage and chips as delicious as they were. But Chase’s dinner was a step above ours, an example of how some traditional English dishes can go beyond the obvious comfort food and satisfy your taste buds in a new way. He had asked for steak and onion pie, but they brought steak and kidney pie, and I’m glad they did – and even happier that he let me have his leftovers.

Kidney has such a distinct flavor, one that I’m compelled to describe as “dark”; but to distinguish it from gamey meats like goat and lamb to which I might apply that adjective, I’d have to add the qualifier “dense.” It’s rich, but not in the way butter is rich – it has a bite to it that makes you realize you’re eating something very specific, something that fulfilled a definite function for the animal it came from, something with more stuff per ounce (iron, cholesterol, whatever else) than anything you’ve eaten all day.

When I mentioned my kidney experience to my mother, she seized the opportunity to repeat what she’s been telling me for years, that chicken liver is the best way to feed yourself cheaply. It was simple, apparently: “What you need to do is put some chicken livers in a pan with some butter, and have them with a huge pile of fried onions.” Apparently the Offal Speech is a major part of British parenting, because when I turned on BBC America, Gordon Ramsey was trying to teach a similar lesson. He had just slaughtered his sheep and was preparing a feast to introduce his children to sweet breads, brains, and tripe. At the end of the meal, he asked who would eat any of it again, and amidst a lot of bouncing up and down and shouts of “Me!” his oldest daughter exclaimed, “Me please, especially sweet breads!”

With encouragement coming from so many directions, I felt I had no choice but to try cooking some kind of internal organ for myself. A container of chicken livers cost $0.90 at Key Food, so chicken livers it was. Chase and his roommates were grilling that night, and were very polite about allowing my slimy experiment sit next to their steaks. I sealed up some liver pieces in a tinfoil pouch along with onion wedges and a few dashes of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. When I took it off the grill after about 20 minutes (probably way longer than necessary, but it's hard to gauge the temperature of the electric grill and I didn't want to risk undercooking), I had a steamy pouch of velvety liver and onions infused with its juices.

Layered on a baguette with some Dijon mustard and roasted grape tomatoes, the liver and onions made a pretty tasty sandwich. It wasn't exactly something you'd find at every pub in England, and perhaps it strayed a little from my mother's instructions to "fry up a heap of liver," but I still felt I was heeding the advice of my English kin in appreciating the deep flavor and cost effectiveness of this distinctive ingredient.