Blood & Guts

Appears in

Published 2004

About

This is the good stuff, the dishes chefs get all misty-eyed about when they talk about food. The “nasty bits” have always been the principal challenge of great cooks throughout history, and when we look back on “what went wrong” with American cuisine, in the era following the Second World War, it began when stuff like this started disappearing off menus.

If you look at turn-of-the-century American menus you’ll find that we used to eat like champions. Kidneys, brains, tongues, hearts, feet, and jowls were all over the place. But, with postwar prosperity, the eating of liver was transformed from a pleasure to an occasional odious chore, reinforced by generations of well-intentioned mothers who urged their kids to eat liver with the blood-chilling admonition, “It’s good for you!” Well, let’s pretend it’s not good for you. Pretend it’s illegal. Hell, if the PETA folks and the Health Taliban have their way, it soon may well be. So, for now, take a chance, take a trip down memory lane—only this time, do it right. A perfunctory, overfried piece of calf’s liver can indeed be the worst thing in the world. But as I hope you will discover, a lovingly prepared one can be sublime.