
Cooking the chicken livers and onion in schmaltz.
Well, “Doro’s Chicken Liver Spread” to be specific. Though I instantly assumed the recipe title was chopped liver. Go figure. I’ve since learned that chopped liver can be chicken, beef, or other livers; for some reason I’ve always assumed it was chicken liver.
I’ve never made liver before — chopped or otherwise. I might have had it freshly prepared long ago, but most chopped liver I can remember consuming was commercially prepared and packaged in tubs. I haven’t seen those tubs for a long time, until just today when I saw a one-pint container in the Kosher frozen food section at the Lexington Stop & Shop.
Maybe I decided to try this recipe because I had Rosh Hashana on my mind. And maybe I had Rosh Hashana on my mind only because my sister-in-law had asked me months ago to bake her a challah for her birthday, which is this month, and now I’m wondering if I want to bake a challah for the holiday. (I will detail my challah adventures in another post later this month if I live to tell.)
. . . But for one of the nicest celebrations I ever went to, small and quiet and vitally important (it was the marriage of my younger daughter), we at perhaps the simplest pate ever cookedover several thousand year by a wandering people. It was exactly right: light and fresh. It was made with loving care by an Orthodox Jewish godmother and eaten by an ecumenical crew of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Orthodox Greeks, Catholics, atheists, and backsliders, with equal pleasure. Here is the recipe for it, and may it be savored in good health!
Doro’s Chicken Liver Spread
1 large white onion, finely diced
4 tablespoons chicken or goose fat
1 pound fresh chicken livers
4 hard-boiled eggs
Pinch of nutmeg
1/4 cup brandy or rye whiskey (“Not too much!”)
Sauté onion in fat until transparent. Add livers, salt, and pepper, and simmer until cooked through. Place in refrigerator overnight, and do same with cooked eggs. The next day chop the eggs finely, add to the livers and onion, and chop all again. Mix lightly, adjust the seasoning, and add a little nutmeg and the liquor. Blend well, but “Do not make it too firm or too loose,” and chill before serving.
-M.F.K. Fisher, With Bold Knife and Fork, Counterpoint, Washington, DC, 1969
Since cooking with liver is new to me, I didn’t even know how easy or difficult it may be for me to find the chicken livers. Lo and behold, I did find some at my local Shaw’s, though I had to look through most of the half dozen or so pint containers before finding one that wasn’t on or past the sell-by date. I now believe this was a lucky find because I haven’t found chicken livers in any likely outlets — including dedicated meat markets — since this initial discovery. *sigh* Hopefully if I want to re-make this for the holidays the more supermarkets will stock more liver. We shall see.
So, with the liver-proper hurdle behind me, I was on to wondering about the chicken fat, which was ironically elusive since, after all, it can be easily carved off a raw chicken. Gary volunteered to buy a small whole chicken and offer up its trimmed fat since, he said, he’d been meaning for some time to try a slow-cooker whole-chicken recipe anyway.
OK, so I’ve got a few hunks of chicken fat. What do I do with them. Enter Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet On Our Immigrant Ancestors (1990, William and Morrow Company Inc, New York). In his recipe for Knishes, he includes a tip on how to render chicken fat, that is, make schmaltz. His instructions (page 253):
Simply combine chopped fresh chicken fat and skin with a little water in a small frying pan over medium-low heat unti the fat is liquid and the solids have shrunk to very small, crunchy bits. This should take about 20 minutes. Strain the bits from the fat and use for other recipes. Watch carefully while rendering so the bits don’t burn. Refrigerate the fat.
OK. Chicken Livers. Chicken Fat. Good to go.
But for how long do I cook the chicken livers? How do I tell when they are done? Temperature? Appearance? Touch? Feel? Smell? Ms. Fisher’s recipe does not say. Conveniently enough, that same Frugal Gourmet book had a recipe for chopped liver (page 254), which says to cook the livers “until they are no longer pink inside, about 5 minutes.” Well, after five minutes my livers were still quite pink, and I admit I was getting a little queasy from cutting open the livers and peeking inside to see still-raw . . . interior? After 20 minutes gray started to become the main interior color, but I was still unsure whether or not to remove them from the heat, even though a quick taste revealed that everything seemed OK. As I casually started to remove liver chunks from pan to nearby bowl, I noticed that the bowled chunks were almost all gray, even though they were still pinkish when removed from the pan. I started to wonder if the stovetop light was affecting the color of the liver in the pan. Assuming that was an issue, I decided to quickly remove all the remaining liver before it got overcooked.
Then I hard-boiled the eggs, put them in the fridge along with the cooled liver and onions, and called it a day . . .
Next day, I peeled and chopped the eggs with some help from a not-so-helpful egg slicer. Then I chopped the eggs a bit more. I don’t quite get Fisher’s instructions to add eggs to liver and chop again, but I did just that and quickly tired of chopping the liver by hand. Not sure if the recipe says chop by hand because a very rustic spread is desired, or if they didn’t have food processors in 1969, or whenever the recipe was originally recorded as such. (The wikipedia entry on food processors says domestic food processors appeared in 1972.) But they did have grinders, right? I guess it would have been called “ground liver” if it was to be ground. Anywho, part of the reason the chopping got so tiring was that the chopping board I was using (Arcitech gripper thingie) was warped so, despite it’s grippy underbelly, it was moving willy-nilly around the countertop and I was too annoyed by it all to transfer my work to a straighter board that required a swatch of non-skid material underneath to keep it anchored. But I digress . . .
So far flavors and textures were coming together nicely. And tasted like the chopped livers I remember. I didn’t detect the nutmeg in the spread after I added it. Before adding the brandy, I hesitated. It tasted just fine at that point, would I ruin it all if I added brandy? I opted to add half — just 2 tablespoons — first. That amount alone I found a tad overwhelming to the taste buds (tasted more brandy than liver and onion), so I left it at that. Admittedly, the longer the spread sat (a few hours to a day, say), the flavors came together better and I could no longer detect the brandy, at least as a strong presence.
Overall a good recipe and chopped-liver experience. I didn’t expect Gary to like it much, but before I knew it he was packing some up to take to work the next day. I did the same, with some Ak-Mak crackers to go with.