To Chopped Liver

I admit I have never actually eaten chopped liver, not to my knowledge. Maybe someone slipped some by me once, back when I was a vegetarian and people sometimes got a secret thrill out of tricking me into eating meat.

 

“What’s the big deal; it’s just beef broth??”

But I’m pretty sure I would have noticed the liver.

My mom was not a fan and so it was served at our dinner tables, though she brought us plates of crawfish and she would pick chicken off bones we thought were clean, saying, “There’s a whole meal left on this!” and magically, she would end up with a plateful of meat.

So, though I have never eaten chopped liver and wouldn’t know it if it were set in front of me, I feel badly that it is the standard to which all awful things are compared.

By stu_spivack (chopped liver and creamed herring) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 You offer someone a lovely coffee. She refuses. “What am I? Chopped liver?”

You just want to end the day with a smooth Malbec, a bowl of cashews and some light conversation about “Breaking Bad,” but he’s not having any of it. “What am I? Chopped liver?”

You haven’t called your uncle in 17 years but you seem him at weddings. When you hug him, you know you love him, but he wonders, as you break apart, “What am I? Chopped liver?”

No one serves chopped liver anymore. Probably all the bad press.

But I believe there is a chef in the Bronx who has made it her life’s mission to save you. She has loved chopped liver since the night her dad made it for her. Her mom was working late and he took the opportunity to make a dinner he knew his wife wouldn’t like. The chef, as a child, would eat anything. They would take her to dinner parties and fancy restaurants and like a party trick, they would order her the strangest thing on the menu: steak tartare, escargot, raw oysters.

She ate with a curiosity unseen in most children. She did not eat a lot, but she was willing, adventurous, it seemed, to the adults, but to her it was, simply, interesting.

Her dad puts down a plate of chopped liver, that mash of liver and onions. The pepper just right. The rye toast on the side. They eat it in silence. He has a drink, something gold, and she, a a Coke. They eat in silence, though they watch each other. Her dad reaches over and rubs a crumb off her lip. She loves the nights when it’s just the two of them.

Chopped liver. Rich. Salty. She will bring it to a table one night, a guest she knows is eager for an adventure. The one who lets her try new dishes out on him.

“What is this?” he says.

“Chopped liver.”