Having horrified the more sensitive with stomachs, lungs and fallopian tubes, I thought to give you a break and go a bit more mainstream, but still in the offal arena. Probably the least divisive offal is the liver, whether from poultry as in liver pâté or foie gras, or from mammals as in many dishes around the world.
Poultry, whether home made or commercial products, is probably the most common source of livers, but here I’m mainly looking at the mammals. And it’s quite a list.
Liver and Onions
Like many, I was brought up with ‘liver, bacon and onions’ about once a fortnight. It wasn’t a highlight. Dredged in too much flour then fried to a leather-like consistency, how could it have been? I was astonished when I finally ate barely cooked liver. So delicious!
Lamb's Liver
The liver of my childhood was nearly always lamb’s liver. Calves liver would have been first choice, but was outside our price range. Still. Nothing wrong with lamb’s liver. I still eat it when I can, although it's not so common here in southern China.
When I accidentally moved to China, I could only find pig and beef liver. I quickly got used to pig liver. Although it has a slightly more offal flavour than lamb’s it’s not overpoweringly so. The beef liver I fed to my cat, Nora. She liked it.
Pig Liver
Since then I’ve eaten horse, donkey, deer and camel liver. Donkey and horse were good. Deer liver was rather gamey and camel even more so. For those with access to deer liver, there is comprehensive information here.
Ignore the recipe for deer haggis; putting maple syrup into haggis is a capital offence in Scotland! Or would be if we had maple syrup, which thankfully we don't!
Never eat the liver of carnivores. In fact, in general I recommend never eating land-dwelling carnivores*. They just don’t taste good. Polar bear liver will probably kill you. Hypervitaminosis A is an often fatal overdose of vitamin A, which polar bear livers have up to 100 times more than we do.
One of the greatest surprises in my life was in a small local restaurant here in Guangxi, but run by a couple from Sichuan. I spotted on the menu 鱼香肝尖, (yú xiāng gān jiān), 腈肝尖 (jīng gān jiān) and 圆葱焗猪肝 (yuán cōng jú zhū gān). These are fish-fragrance liver, quick fried liver and onion steamed pork liver. In fact, they are all pork liver. Over the next few days I sampled them all. The fish-fragrant liver had the classic Sichuan flavours. The quick fried liver was the opposite of what my mother cooked but roughly the same ingredients. The onion steamed pork liver became my favourite liver and onions dish ever.
Pork Liver with Flowering Chives
I’m not going to be so crass as to to tell you how to cook liver and onions; you probably have your own tried and tested family recipes, but if not the interwebs are full of them – some more inspiring than others. But I do recommend you add some green chilli peppers and Sichuan peppercorns to pep them up.
In fact, the internet has hundreds of recipes for all sorts of liver dishes.
One thing I don’t remember from growing up is these, available in my local supermarket.
These are fish livers from some unidentified species, probably carp. Yes, I spelled that correctly. I’ve never cooked them, but I do like me some monkfish liver – the foie gras of the sea, also available in some stores. That said, as children, we were regularly dosed with cod liver oil, whatever that was about.
Monkfish Liver
*Although pigs will eat pretty much everything, they are generally vegetarian when left to their own devices.
