Healthy Eating, Clean Liver

I've been very tired, lately.

The really good thing to do here, as well as sleep and more fruit and veg, is to eat liver. It's got all sorts of good things in it and I always feel better after getting it down. There are two main problems for me with eating liver, though. The first is that I don't actually enjoy the process: it has an odd, grainy texture, and it tastes funny, and as a child I was trained to avoid offal. The second is that I'm not sure which restaurants in my home city will actually cook and sell the stuff.

The solution is obvious: cook it myself. So, laden with a dollar-fifty slice of the internal organ of an ox, an eight-fifty packet of bacon, and some mushrooms, I hied me home to have a go, with the aid of The Joy of Cooking (1975, 13th Ed.), a tome of approximately the same size and fascination as Brewer's.

There are some general rules for any new recipe:
- Clean up the kitchen as you go.
- Throw enough onions, garlic, potato, and beef-stock in and almost anything will taste okay.
- Follow the recipe as closely as you can in quantities and ingredients.
I had problems with the last - I howled when I realised that there was only one small onion left to dice and, no matter how hard I looked, I didn't actually have half a cup of bacon lard to cook with, alas. I made do with slices of bacon, trimmed of the fat, and cooking oil.

Now, the cool thing about The Joy of Cooking is that it doesn't just give a recipe, it has instructions on different kinds of foods and the special things that you should do with them. For example, I found out that I should wipe my liver with a damp cloth, peel off the grey membrane that ran around my slice like a cheese-rind, and soak it in milk for several hours. This last was discovered at six in the evening and meant that I started my serious cooking at nine.

At that point, I was reading all about 'dredging' the meat with Seasoned Flour - you throw flour, paprika, nutmeg, salt, pepper and the sliced meat into a plastic baggy, hang tight to the neck of the bag, and shake the whole thing liberally. The Joy of Cooking has two ribbon bookmarks, by the way, which were very useful at this point, what with turning back and forth for instructions.

Then I was 'braising' my liver, which means browning it in a pan and then adding hot beef-stock and the other ingredients to half boil and half fry for a quarter hour. My final result involved ox-liver, bacon, onion, garlic, potato, beef-stock, chicken-stock, and a bit of white wine that a long-vanished dinner guest brought in. I'd forgotten the mushrooms.

Now, my flatmate Michael (David was out) had politely but very, very firmly declined to partake of my repast. I'd tried to keep him involved in the experience by describing the membrane peeling, and the washing off of the blood, and the mysterious holes in the meat that I really hoped were left by arteries, but he wasn't having any. This meant that I ended with a bowlful of browny-greyey-blacky things that somehow smelt delicious, and only me to eat it. It was very good - the sauce and other bits were flavourful, the taste and texture of the liver not too intrusive. I went to bed with a comfortable, warm weight in my tummy and, while I still didn't sleep well, I didn't wake up still exhausted either. I had the rest for lunch today, with butter-fried mushrooms added in, and it was very tasty then, too.

I'm glad I went through the whole thing.

Now, The Joy of Cooking also has recipes for Brains (p. 504). Ha ha! Night of the Living Cook, coming soon ...