Liver Redux

The mere mention of the word liver causes most people born after 1980 to balk. Perhaps they were overexposed to their grandmothers’ tough, overcooked version of it. Cartoons and kids’ shows depicting liver as the ultimate in adult misunderstanding of what kids want (pizza) served to deepen this distaste until it became the instinctual retch that it is now. However, I’d like to think that the rise of chefs like Fergus Henderson signal a willingness to reconsider. I have always loved liver (except during my vegetarian years) because I always had it cooked to the point that the outside was brown and crisp and the inside hot and creamy. It was always accompanied by fried onions that complimented the richness of the liver and, a little surprisingly given their own sulfur content, mollified somewhat the unpleasant flavors of the sulfur compounds that give liver its sometimes overstated flavor. So, this week I set out to find a way to make chicken liver, my favorite kind, more palatable to my peers. Only the cayenne and the grapes are actually my ideas; the rest of the recipe I cobbled together from bastardized Epicurious recipes. After some experimenting during the week, I recruited Colleen, whose generation regards chicken liver as a delicacy, to give me a hand and we got to work.

Liver and Onions… and grapes

To start with I decided that I wanted my liver to be accompanied by the traditional onions, but I needed to do something to give them a distinctive flavor to balance the “liver-ness” that my generation dislikes. I recalled some caramelized onion tarts I made on Thanksgiving and decided to replicate the filling for this dish. I slow cooked my onions with some salt and sugar until they were golden and sweet looking and then mixed in equal parts rosemary and thyme and made them into a bed for my livers.

While the onions were cooking, I rinsed, trimmed, and seasoned my raw chicken livers. Then I took the pan that I caramelized the onions in and heated it and some sunflower oil until it was on the cusp of smoking, and then I tossed in the livers. I cooked them for about 3 minutes a side until they were nice and brown:

So there I had it, liver and onions, and the first time I made it, I stopped here. Yet, something was missing from my plan: the livers were good, but I had failed to fully isolate that which makes liver great– creamy texture, rich flavor– from that which makes people hate it. Also, the liver and onions was very heavy and almost flatly rich and sweet; it needed something with some pep and aroma. So, the next time I made the dish, I set to work on a pan sauce that would cut the heaviness. An Epicurious recipe suggested vinegar, but that seemed too acrid for my taste. So I decided to balance the vinegar with grapes. I halved and seeded them and threw them in the pan after the livers were plated. I tossed them around the pan for about 2 minutes and then deglazed the pan with the vinegar, swirled in some butter and a fat pinch of cayenne, and I had sauce.

I nestled the livers onto the onions, gave them a nice layer of grapes, and then sauced them. The result was a dish that highlighted what I love about liver with the added bonus that the other ingredients– caramelized onion, herbs, vinegar, grapes– were the perfect counterweight not only to the hated livery flavor but also to each other.

The Recipe

4 medium onions cut into .5cm slices
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp each rosemary, thyme, black pepper
300g (12oz) fresh chicken livers rinsed and trimmed
2/3 cup grapes halved and seeded
1/4 cup wine vinegar
2 tsp butter
fat pinch of cayenne