Week 15: Pan-fried Liver with Tomatoes

The book: Good Housekeeping New Step-by-Step Cookbook

The recipe: p190, "Pan-fried Liver with Tomatoes"

Liver! Can the supermarket shelves boast a more polarising foodstuff? A supply-stretcher from the days of wartime rationing that somehow clung on as a kitchen staple long into my childhood, the overcooked boot leather we were served up at primary school was surely one of the main reasons I begged my parents to let me take a packed lunch instead. (At least until middle school, when I realised I could squirrel away most of the dinner money they were giving me and subsist on two packets of Space Raiders, but that's a different matter.)

Cooked right, of course, liver can be a whole lot more palatable, and I have very occasionally returned to it in the meantime - this Hairy Bikers recipe does a good job of hiding the worst characteristics of the ingredient, mainly by masking them with bacon - but I can't claim to ever get much of a craving for it. Perhaps I should, because apparently it's a superfood nowadays (though what isn't?). But let's be honest, it's a bit icky and disgusting too, at least when you allow yourself to think hard enough about what it is you're actually consuming.

Still, the random finger of fate points where it will, and so today we turn to the second Good Housekeeping recipe book in my collection - they're quite similar in content and the other one is newer and pwettier, but this one has been with me since my immediate post-student days and taught me how to make a good solid shepherd's pie, so I'm loath to throw it out.

I find myself almost wishing I had done when this week's choice turns out to be the unimaginatively named "Pan-fried Liver with Tomatoes" - particularly since the pages on either side would have offered up minted lamb burgers and roast pork loin respectively. Damn you, fate! But oh well. You don't win anything on the lottery just because your numbers are one out, so there's nothing else for me to do but scrunch up that losing ticket, sigh wistfully, and get my offal on.

 

The prep: One of the few saving graces of liver is that it's incredibly cheap. (Another is "at least it's not kidneys".) The recipe calls for lamb's liver; I have a feeling I may have picked up calves' liver by mistake, but there tends not to be a massive difference once it's been cooked to any degree of edibility, so hey.

And since we're already making compromises, I can't justify buying a whole bottle of the requisite Marsala or sweet sherry solely for the sake of marinating some liver, so I substitute in the Shaohsing rice wine from several weeks ago, mixed with some soft brown sugar to temper the sharpness. After all, it's still going to taste offal (arf!) at the end of the day.

Other than that, nothing out of the ordinary is called for here (tomatoes, onions, some ground ginger because why not) - although it does take a bit of effort to source lamb stock cubes, which is surprising. Are they out of fashion? Were they ever in fashion?

The making: The recipe doesn't mention washing and patting dry the liver, but I do that first because otherwise it'd be even more disgusting. 

What the recipe does mention is slicing the liver into "wafer-thin strips". 

Even with the sharpest of knives, I would contend that liver does not have the kind of consistency to allow for anything approaching wafer-like accuracy, but either way "reasonably thin chunks" will have to do. 

These are then left to marinate in the faux Marsala for a couple of hours.

♫ Feels like I'm flying, like if I had dinners
Like I am sailing on a sea of innards ♫

Once we're ready to go, three medium-sized tomatoes are peeled (Sarah, you were right; skinning tomatoes is easy when you do it properly), quartered, de-seeded and sliced. The onions also get the slicing treatment before being fried in the oil along with a pinch of ginger for five minutes. I'm already sold on the ginger thing at this point - it gives a nice bouncy kick to proceedings that I can tell will help to offset the potential blandness of the liver.

Next, the onions are set aside and the liver is added to the pan and fried until nicely sealed. Then the tomatoes, the set-aside onions and the elusive lamb stock are added, and the whole lot is brought to the boil and bubbled down until the mixture thickens into something broadly approaching a sauce. 

Even then, the contents of the frying pan never really become a coherent whole - not for the first time in the Random Kitchen project, this ends up being less a dish, more a bunch of ingredients in close proximity to each other.

The recipe says "Serve with noodles." Piffle. Just as the internet is for porn and I am for dance, a saucy liver dish is for mashed potato. Plus some roasted broccoli for good measure. (Robin, roasted broccoli is the dog's brassica. Oil, garlic and pepper, 20 minutes or so until nicely browned at the edges, bam.)

The eating: Sam's natural scepticism concerning the texture of liver (which I share up to a point) is tempered by the decently tasty accompaniment - not for nothing is "liver and onions" the accepted way of serving/distracting from the foodstuff in question, while the tartness of the tomato, ginger and rice wine "gravy" makes firm friends with the mash.

Even after several hours of marinating, the texture of the liver still pervades the whole meal, of course - but as a cheap, filling and really quite quick and straightforward evening meal, if you can cope with the truth of offal in the first place then this really isn't a bad effort at all.

I remain firmly Team Hairy Bikers when it comes to the additional bacon thing, though - I may have taught myself to enjoy liver, but I'm not daft.

One-word verdict: Acceptable.