The glory of liverwurst

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Another good food article.

Enjoy!

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There is surprisingly little information available on the web about liverwurst.

Since it is a type of sausage, there is at least vicarious history

online: Meat products and parts and other animal whatnottery (including

organs and other things most packing-houses would throw away with

disdain, or sell to southerners like me), ground into a paste with

plenty of solid fat and hopefully some strong spices, have been stuffed

into cleaned animal intestines and served as food probably for nearly as

long as we’ve been cooking with fire. There’s truth behind the yarn,

" law and sausage are the two things you don’t want to see being made. "

Ah, but the eating: Salami and mortadella from Italy, which amount to

raw pork (don’t make it at home); patty-style breakfast sausage;

" Italian " sausage with the hot pepper flakes in it (spectacular with

sautéed bell pepper, onion, and garlic); summer sausage with cheese and

barbecue sauce; and the poor man’s pâté, Liverwurst. Liverwurst is

different from the others in that it’s spreadable (at least the good

stuff is), and there’s liver, among other things, in it.

The nutritional balance is another thing you don’t want to know about, but

true to my form, I’ll proceed anyway: Better than 75% of the calories

come from fat. There’s a ton of vitamin A in it, but it’s the toxic kind.

Carrots have a substance, beta-carotene, that makes your body produce

its own vitamin A. You don’t need to worry about OD’ing on beta-carotene.

You don’t really need to worry about OD’ing on vitamin A from liverwurst

either, but it is at least possible to OD on vitamin A. Just so you know.

But, like cheesecake, the flavor and texture of liverwurst are worth its

impeachable

nutritional profile. Be careful what you buy: There are some imported

German brands, go figure; Germans invented liverwurst that are tough,

slimy, and armpit-flavored. Good old Amurrican Mayer is about the

best you can find, when you can find it. It is a tad strong-flavored, as

liverwurst must be, and goes well with hearty rye bread, raw white

onions, and mustard. I take good old Amurrican French’s yellow mustard

on my liverwurst. And beer. (The Mayer liverwurst is referred to

on the package as Braunschweiger, which a food encyclopedia will tell

you is a subset of liverwurst, being always spreadable and supposedly

reinforced with milk and eggs. You won’t always find the milk and eggs

in it, though. No matter.)

At least one restaurant, my favorite Irish pub in Destin, Florida, serves it

exactly

that way: Liverwurst, raw onion, rye bread, and mustard. Their

liverwurst sandwich deal includes a free beer. They pile a pound of meat

on the sandwich (about 1520 calories), and to eat that entire pâté mound

would probably initiate one of those near-death experiences you read

about. But if you eat three of them, you get a free t-shirt and an

Alka-Seltzer. They serve it with low cholesterol potato chips, so it’s

okay. I can get through about half the sandwich, usually after asking

for extra bread. And beer. Then I return to the condo, lie on the couch,

and have a two-hour near-consciousness experience.

Liverwurst, along with Beethoven’s late string quartets, Michelangelo’s

artworks,

and automated travel, is one of the greatest achievements in the panoply

of " dead European male " culture. At the dawn of the Age of Liverwurst,

somewhere in north-central Europe, there were round-bellied, middle-aged,

extremely European males enduring relatively harsh winters wearing

garments that didn’t cover their legs, gathered around a carcass. They

set to work on all its inside parts and outside parts. Such men had a

flair for making dead animal parts appetizing and giving them long shelf

lives. (Some Italian dried sausages keep for many months at room

temperature; and prosciutto, the dried Italian ham, is aged at room

temperature, near the sea with windows open, for two years. As usual,

Italians remain the most accomplished dead European males with regard to

food, the glory of liverwurst notwithstanding.)

It wasn’t European males who invented beer, as far as we can guess, it

was

Egyptians, but beer might predate them too, but it took Europeans to

elevate it to the passion it is today. You can’t swing a sausage in

Belgium or Holland without knocking over a microbrewery, and each

brewery custom orders special snifters for its beer(s) to highlight

whatever character the brewer wants you to detect, different shapes

accentuate particular aroma components differently, or so I hear. And as

someone once said about a golf course without wind: Liverwurst without

beer is like a face without a nose.

You can buy Alka-Seltzer anywhere.

Make yourself part of the great onward march of culture; relive the grandeur

of ages past; feel a connectedness with the best of the untold

generations before you, and those to come: Experience the glory of

liverwurst.

Brad Edmonds

freedomwins2001@...