Tina is smiling even though it is not liver in sour cream.
Liver in Sour Cream
This recipe is bitter-sweet, or is ambivalent a better descriptive? Everyone agrees that Liver in Sour Cream is the best way to eat liver, but is eating liver a good idea?
“Liver is a rich source of a host of important nutrients, including folate and vitamin B-12, as well as iron. Eating liver can also expose you to some potentially dangerous effects, such as vitamin A toxicity and contact with heavy metals.” www.livestrong.com
“But the liver doesn’t store toxins.” www.thankyourbody.com/eat-liver
And the recipes that follow these website wisdoms explain how to hide liver in other dishes.
Anny taught us that you don’t hide liver; you drown it in sour cream, serve it with rice and spinach.
Aside from the health and gastronomic issues, there are the social issues. Tina claims she was forced to eat liver with sour cream the night of her prom, dressed to the nines, nails polished pink, looking gorgeous, and she was crying and gagging down the liver in sour cream, demanding, “Why are you doing this to us?”
There was no answer, but it seems with the wisdom of hindsight that it was Anny’s reminder to be good, stay strong, and never forget your upbringing. Beauty, let alone glamour, had no place at the table. Tina says, “If Anny ever told me I looked nice, I knew I didn’t.”
Lou’s strategy was more direct, not much more direct, but more direct. When a young man would show up for dinner, Lou would gobble down the meal, then cover his eyes with his hands and glare through his fingers at the hapless young man. The girls knew by the end of the meal whether the young man had passed muster or not by the length of time it took Lou to remove the jail of fingers from his eyes.
This recipe passed muster with 5 kids and a gastronomic Frenchman, so trust us; it’s good.
Serves 2
1 lb. thin-sliced beef liver (get it sliced frozen, so that it is only ¼ inch thick)
1 tbsp. butter for frying the liver in a pan
½ cup sour cream
salt to taste
After cooking the liver thoroughly, remove to the serving plate. Add the sour cream to the juices in the pan and stir quickly to make a gravy. Pour over the liver, salt, and serve.
Tina, thanks for this treat. I respond to the story about liver - I think our mothers were taught that liver was "good for you" and fed it to their families accordingly - "force fed" is more accurate. I always hated it with a hearty passion, and think I was undiplomatic and vocal about this. Your mother, my dearest Aunt Honey, insisted she could make me like it, and tried, though I don’t recall any sour cream. I do recall telling her she had failed, politely I am sure. Ha! This is lovely and fun. —David Barton
Grilled Vivanneau
Fresh Red Snapper is almost as good as lobster. Here it has been grilled and filleted before serving.
Make a marinade of olive oil, some chopped onions and garlic, some chopped parsley, and salt and pepper. Let the whole snapper marinade in the oil mixture for an hour before grilling. While the snapper is soaking, prepare the charcoal fire and let the coals burn down to an even white.
After oiling the grill to prevent sticking, throw the fish on the grill over the coals and cook sparingly, maybe 5 minutes. Flip the fish over and grill the other side, only 4 minutes. Remove from the grill. Lou then stripped the skin off and fileted the fish, but you don’t have to if the scales were removed. Serve the fish with some lemon and maybe another sprinkling of salt and pepper.
Main Dishes
Stuffed Peppers
Anny’s version of the recipe includes a fair amount of uncertainty. We had our test kitchen in Vermont (Lassiter’s) nail down all the variables in this beloved recipe.
For 6 servings:
3 bell peppers
1 cup cooked rice
½ lb. hamburger
1 small chopped onion
2 cloves chopped garlic
Salt and pepper as needed
Grated cheese
Cut the peppers in half and remove the seeds and stems. Blanche them over steaming water for 2 minutes. Set in oiled baking dish.
Brown in a pan the onion, garlic, and hamburger. Add the rice. Season as needed. Scoop the mixture into the 6 half-peppers. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle with grated cheese; return to oven for another 5 minutes. Serve.
LENTIL CASSEROLE
Lentil Casserole was Jenny’s choice for the special birthday meal. It was prepared with sausages in the beans. That’s about it. Of all the choices available in the culinary world, this was Jenny’s first pick.
The birthday meal was an honor. The birthday day was an honor. In ways it was more important than Christmas, because the birthday celebrant was the only one.
One was not much of a concept in this family of seven. We learned to cut pies in seven evenly-divided pieces. We shared bedrooms. We wore hand-me-downs, some with real lineage. The word “one” could only be applied to “the bathroom.”
We kids took turns going to work with Lou because it was the one and only chance to visit with him, one on one, in the car coming and going. It was always a long day, leaving before dawn, working or watching the construction site for nine or ten hours, and coming back after dark but just in time for supper. The one perk was lunch in a diner. And the long, rambling conversations with a man who otherwise spoke few words.
In later years, when the kids had grown up and left home, and Jenny had kids of her own, she recognized in long-distance phone calls to her parents how much she craved being the one. She never thought about it as a kid, just as she never thought about breathing, or the invention of zero. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that she realized how desperately she wanted time alone with her parents. One. Embedded in Alone.
Lentil Casserole, 13th birthday. A memorable day. Anny and Lou gave Jenny a string of pearls that she still has. The kids at school sang Happy Birthday to her as she stood alone on the stage, wearing Anny’s peasant blouse with embroidered flowers around the keyhole neckline that was years later stolen from her backpack in a youth hostel in Vienna. One memorable day. Lentil Casserole.
Grilled Lobster
Lou preparing the lobsters
La Fondue at La Clusaz, French Alps, 1951
“You have to be quick if you don’t want a finger to end up on someone else’s fork.”
This is the recipe so far, as discovered last year by cousin Mary Barton Harwood in her box of recipes in Katy, Texas. Evidently Honey sent this folded card to her sister Lydia Pope Barton as a Christmas greeting in 1951. As presented, it doesn’t qualify as a recipe, even by our loose standards. As we find more fragments, we will fill in the information, much like the Rosetta Stone.
April Fools Dinner
2 cans of sliced dog food to look like beef hash
1 fried egg per person, yolk died green, served on top of the hash
French fries made of raw apples
Kool-Aid made of Jell-o
1 cardboard box with heavy icing for dessert
Lou said the hash was good.
How about the time that Lou shot the pigeons in the barn and Annie cooked them up for dinner. I was pretty young but I am sure I did not eat that. Being a picky eater I am not sure I ate alot of these things.
—- Carry Zoal Loustau Byrum
Hmmm...What about Frog Brain Soup and Shepard’s Cow Pie??
I don’t recall the specific recipes but I do recall Emerson warning me to beware of them.
—-Anonymous