Liver and Onions

"Stanley slowly peeled an onion. He liked eating them one layer at a time." -- Holes, by Louis Sachar
"Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?" -- The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

The Duck and Pork Terrine, buttoned up in bacon.

One of my favorite things about prep work is the way the projects lull me into a reverie about the past, about food in general, and the underpinnings of a life spent in the Industry. The grisly tasks especially, like prying pig cheeks apart from a frozen, 60 pound mass of them in the bottom of the back sink, or searing duck livers in a rondeaux sitting on a knee-level flame, one arm thrown up before my face to protect myself from spatters –the grisly tasks especially encourage a wandering mind.

The terrines are perfect examples. We make two different types: Duck and Chicken Liver, and Pork and Duck (that one has pistachios and is wrapped in bacon). The name “terrine” refers to the vessel in which the mixture is cooked – and because it is a French-style offering, the mixture could be just about anything: finches with raisins, goldfish and chanterelle, horsemeat and black walnuts. You name it. Grind it up, put it in what is, for all intents and purposes, an elongated meatloaf pan, cook it or not, and call it a Fancy Appetizer. Pairs wonderfully well with wines from the Côtes du Rhône.

Both terrines are time-consuming processes, but the liver terrine leaves me with bits of ground liver in my hair and smeared across my cheeks. Globs of it spatter my glasses as I pound it through a fine-mesh sieve. When I leave work after making the liver terrine, I am followed home by cats; the next day there is a feline cotillion on my front stoop, so many cats that I wonder if they are bearing an invitation for me to attend Dogwarts School of Seeing-Eyed Dog Trainers. (A girl can dream.) As messy as it is, however, this Fancy App is also fairly simple:

Liver Terrine
5 lbs duck livers
5 lbs chicken livers
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil to cook

1 ½ c chopped shallots
2 Tbs minced garlic
1 c Madeira
1 c Brandy

2 lbs butter, cubed
1 c heavy cream whipped into soft peaks

You will also need:
A large saute' pan
A Robot Coupe, Cuisinart, or, God help you, a Food Mill
A 24” Terrine, sprayed and lined with Cling Wrap
Some Fortitude

(Please note the batch size of this recipe; home cooks should scale back.)

Heat the oil in the pan. Meanwhile, blot any blood from the livers (dry flesh sears better) and liberally sprinkle salt and pepper across the organs.

Carefully place the livers in a single layer across the bottom of the pan. This should be pretty fast and furious – you want a nice brown exterior, with a bit of rose left in the center of the liver. When you are satisfied with your sear, transfer the livers to a large mixing bowl.
Add some shallots and garlic and sauté gently for about two minutes. Deglaze with some of the booze. Let this reduce until the bubbles are the size of quarters. WATCH CAREFULLY.

Spatulate this mixture into the mixing bowl with the livers.
Repeat process until all your livers are seared, all the garlic and shallots have been sautéed, and all your booze has been reduced.
 Throw the butter on top of the meat, etc. in the mixing bowl.
 
As the butter softens, set up your Grinding/Pounding Area. I like to have the full mixing bowl on the left of the prep counter, the Robot Coupe (Robo Cop) in the middle, and an 8-qt. cambro cradling a chinoise on the right. I also make sure there is a place to set the liver-filled chinoise down as you transfer the finished mixture into yet a third container. You’ll work out a system – you just want to avoid introducing any grainy bits of the ground mixture into the container holding the finished mixture.

In stages, grind the liver mixture, transfer it into the sieve (chinoise), wrap your arms around the base of the cambro and smash the hell out of the mix with the base of a 6 oz ladle to push it through the fine metal mesh. Careful! This is when the liver dance really starts to get messy!

Repeat process until all the mix has been grounded and pounded.

Wash face and change apron.

Someone, you or a kitchen elf, should have already whipped the cream and lined a sprayed terrine with plastic.
Fold the cream into the smooth liver mixture. Taste to correct for salt. Some people add a drizzle of Truffle Oil at this stage. I do not.

Pour into the lined terrine and wrap the plastic over the top of the loaf. Label, date, refrigerate.

After it sets for at least 24 hours, serve in slices with a drizzle of fancy olive oil, some North Atlantic grey salt (kidding! Any large crystal salt is fine), a dollop of dijon and crustinis. A tuft of salted, oil-drizzled herbs, especially chervil and parsley, is nice with this. Makes approximately 110 portions.

See? Piece of cake.

During the course of the terrine's preparation, I snack on bits of seared livers and, without fail, the flavors of iron, earthy-nuttiness and Mailard caramel take me back to suppertime, circa 1978: Liver and Onions. Whether in the Poseys' house or down and across the way at the neighboring Kugel household, Liver and Onions was a dinner fixture, at least twice a month during the good times, and I have a very clear recollection of putting it down as my "Favorite Meal" during a Fourth Grade Survey.

This reminiscence is spurred forward by the almost unbearable onionyness of the back kitchen. As this is (ostensibly) a Cajun-Creole house, we go through about 50 gallons of Trinity – onions, green peppers, and celery – a week. Also, everything is cooked with garlic, and garnished with chives or scallions, or fried shallots. Or fried leeks. So the prep list is usually heavy on the alliums. It is interesting that lillies, the flowering cousins of onions and garlic -- are so heavily perfumed: Victorian ladies living in a tannery town.

On the really bad days, when the list dictates filling a 22 qt container with diced onions, and another one with sliced onions, along with 12 qts of green onions, and 20 pounds of shallot brunoise, the kitchen fills with fumes and we weep as though watching “War Horse.” We gasp and stagger and clutch at our faces. We are inconsolable.

The smell comes from sulfuric compounds that the onion pulls up from the soil – “sweet” onions are grown in less sulfury areas. These sulfuric compounds are held in storage areas and can only be released if a certain enzyme turns the key. This enzyme is released when the knife cuts through the onion’s skin and damages the enzyme’s storage vacuole– think of a jailor who, finding his office destroyed by an unseen, terrifying force, rushes from cage to cage, freeing the sulfuric monsters within…There’s something about this that reminds me of “The Chronicles of Riddick”…. Sure, we could have probably helped our cause by chilling the onions first, but we didn’t and now we are in the grip of a terrible alliumic sorrow. 

The sulfuric stink is so different from the pleasure derived from a whiff of onions cooking in butter, a smell I associate with comfort and warmth, hearth and home. (Listed as one of my "Favorite Smells" in the same Fourth Grade Survey, along with Thunderstorms, Lilacs, and the Pads of a Dog's Foot.) If you are running behind in your preparation for a dinner party, get the onions started in butter and your guests will walk into a home redolent of promise. To achieve really good caramelization, go low and slow for a while to “melt” the onions, then bump up the heat – a little – and don’t stir very often. 

Liver and onions is one of those dishes you don’t see on menus very often anymore. This could be because the liver is the body’s filter, and to be good it needs to come from an animal that wasn’t pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones during its short trip from birth to butcher. Also, I don’t like tasting the nasty metallic flavors of adrenalin and fear hormones that flood the creature’s system as it nears the end, flavors much more apparent in the liver than in the flesh. Abbatoir terroir. But, better livers can be found if one cares to try. In Seattle there are enough small butcheries, not to mention a certain prediliction toward better food, that finding a plump liver from a happy calf who died while laughing over a slice of blueberry pie is not outside the realm of the possible. Once in hand, I’d dry the organ, season it and set it aside. Then I’d start the onions in butter and get changed for company. As the calf’s liver is not the only liver to be tended to, I’d also make a martini.

When the onions are almost done and company had arrived (more martinis), I’d sear the liver over a pretty high heat, quickly on each side. Serve with caramelized onions, a simple salad, buttered bread, wine, and stories about shared history. My favorite flavors.

Fall Menu, 2011

We would never call inexplicable little insights “hunches,” for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoreticaly hang.  – The City & The City, by China Miéville

We’ve reached the season when I begin to cast about, assess the work completed during the year versus the work yet to be done, and shake my head at the predictable results of doing the math. I begin to eye my sweaters with a certain anticipatory fondness. I oil my boots. This used to be the time of year for new pencils, protractors, compasses, and Trapper-Keepers™, items supplanted over the years by knives and Sharpies™. Here in Seattle, the sky shows off its cheeriest colors: Orphanage Grey, Bedlam Bedding, Paper-Pulp Pewter, and the days become acutely, palpably shorter. 

For me, these depressive forces conspire to make eating in good company, already a true pleasure, an absolute must. And if you’re in the business of feeding people, this is the time of year when you can safely ramp up the butter and cream, sprinkle on a bit more cheese, and help a brother mammal out with his layer of fat. When I was writing a new menu every three months, for my last job, this was the time of year when the narrative thrust behind the food was the most graspable for me, when I was most able to articulate to cooks, servers, customers and management the idea that food is story, and story is food. Maybe because Autumnal food is often the result of community efforts like harvesting, and putting produce up, and that telling stories to pass the time during the tedious, necessary work to preserve enough food for the winter is simply part of the human experience. 

At its best, menu writing felt like channeling, as though a great swirling collective Memory of Meals had gathered, storm-like, on the horizon, and I had only to set out pots to catch whatever fell from the sky. At its worst, however, menu writing was like a scene from the latter half of Danny Boyle’s "127 Hours," hours 85 through 119, perhaps. Most often, writing a menu meant a prolonged idyll among ideas about food and geography, time and people and gatherings, surrounding myself with books detailing whichever region’s food I was pitching, weighing the various menu items according to how much whimsy, accessibility, deliciousness and prettiness they had. And then I turned the menu in to the higher-ups and waited for the inevitable changes. Not everyone thinks whimsy needs to be on the menu.

I could not talk about menu writing without including a favorite bit from an early chapter in John Lanchester’s ridiculously delightful book, The Debt to Pleasure:

It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology, and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.

That pretty much sums it up, and includes the word “chthonic,” which I never get to use. Ever. Although future hangman games may be spiced up accordingly. 

As some of you may know, I am a reader. I am also a re-reader. I will revisit a story over and over again, despite the teetery stack of books not-yet-read, books-not-finished, and books-I-should-read-but-probably-won’t. In some cases re-reading is a retreat, a way to escape immediately from day to day kitchen life that doesn’t involve whiskey, a trap-door to another world.  Sometimes a re-read recontextualizes events in the daily life – a clear case of the subconscious reaching out and shoving a book into my hands when that story is the one I most wish/need to hear, or a story containing an element previously ignored or unnoticed, simply because that detail wasn’t (yet) pertinent. Those moments of discovery are to me what the glint of something shiny in the sand must be to a beach-dweller, who believed his stretch of sand well-combed.  And sometimes the only impetus is sentimentality, the indulgence of the desire to stroll along familiar paths, to run my hands over touchstones from my youth, to console myself that I am still the same girl who cried until she had hiccups the third time through Where the Red Fern Grows. All of these books have become a part of my subconscious’s library, a place I’d like to imagine cozy and fire-lit, without the overflowing file cabinets and piles of papers and dubious sense of organization employed by my conscious mind.

So, come menu-writing time, all these books – fiction, non, atlases, picture books, cookbooks – all those ideas, places, pictures, and thoughts, are at the disposal of the Subconscious, who, still in pajamas, eating a piece of toast with peanut butter, sipping a nice cup of coffee, puts together a little something and sends it up to the Worker Brain, who skipped breakfast and is running late but who will nevertheless recognize the value of the idea behind a Hemingway Menu, featuring foods from Spain, France and Africa…and look. Worker Brain missed the bus. But there is an Idea in hand. 

As I’m no longer in the business of writing a Fall Menu for an actual restaurant, I asked my Subconscious if I could take a look around, maybe see if I could come up with a Clog Blog, get a little work done. The reply was vague, the directions terrible, but I did find my way to a library where two books sat on a coffee table. Interestingly, it was the same coffee table we had in the house I grew up in. There was a note, but I couldn’t read it, so I turned my attention to the books.

The first, The Sugarloaf Mountain Cookbook is a community cookbook, printed on humble brown paper, bound the way things were bound in the ‘70s, with a black plastic spiral. The recipes were contributed by women who lived on the mountain where I grew up, some of whom suffered from a late-season overabundance of zucchini, others sharing tips about high-altitude cooking (a science lesson for another time). This cookbook is an especial favorite because my mother did the illustrations – when I wander through the pages I’m not really looking at the food, I’m looking at pen-and-ink evocations of my childhood.  

The other is never too far from my thoughts. I’ve read it over and over again, each time taking away something new –  the trials and tribulations of leadership, the buoyant force of hope and optimism against the oppressive forces of fear and ignorance, the value of teamwork, the sometimes pleasantly surprising outcome of talking to strangers, youth surrendering to old age, the usefulness of Story when a group’s cohesion begins to disintegrate.  And lately, as Seattle’s urban landscape more and more includes chicken coops, which means that hutches can't be too far behind, I can’t help but think about the deliciousness of rabbit.

I left the Subconscious library with a draft of “The Watership Down Menu.” Along with such items as “Owsla in a Blanket,” “Pipkin Surprised,” and “Chervil Chimichurri,” the menu would include Beer-Braised Hindquarters, with Roasted Swedes (rutabagas) and Flayrah Thlayli, with an especially hoppy beer and a nice tuft of lacinato kale and radicchio. Perfect for a Fall dinner with friends.