An offaly good week
One of the truly wonderful thing about culinary school is how much you get to take home with you. The daily output of the school’s army of students across patisserie and cuisine is enormous, so without the students help much of it would go to waste. This is just as well since several hours spent in a hot kitchen is not conducive to culinary fireworks when you finally get home. Most of the time, the preparations that you bring home are ready to eat: a soup, a salad, some bread etc. whatever you made that day or was being offered up as spare. But just occasionally something crops up that is about to reach the date past which it can no longer be used (just 3 days is standard for almost all fresh food).
This week we were making stocks, so I greedily scooped up a couple of excess veal bones, fat with unctuous bone marrow. Simply poached, topped with some chopped chervil and spread on hot toast, they made a fantastically gluttonous supper—and also a highly nutritious one. If you were lucky enough to be in the affluent and hip crowd that eats at Fergus Henderson’s astonishing St John Brasserie in Farringdon, you might have paid a hefty price for such a decadent meal!
Another by product of the week’s labours was a tub of meaty jus. As a humble student, buying a piece of meat to eat this with was out of the question, but what better than an old fashioned classic to accompany this intensely flavoured sauce: an early spring lamb’s liver, lightly fried with onions. Delicious!
Liver is massively underrated; it went out of fashion in the late 50s and 60s when the price of meat fell after the war and offal in general fell off the radar. After that it was the kind of nightmarish creation churned out in school dinner halls until the end of the 20th century, overcooked and dry with a peculiar savoury taste. Liver is, however, a fantastic way to add richness many dished from forcemeat and stews, like your bog standard Bolognese enriched with a couple of fresh chicken livers, to fabulous meat pies and stuffing. It’s also exceptionally cheap for such a versatile, flavoursome product, which often (criminally) just goes to waste
The best way to cook it though is not to disguise its true nature, it wants to be gently cooked and accompanied with something slightly sweet, but otherwise unfused over: sliced and fried with onions for am cute or two, made into a smooth paté and spread on toast, or (another Fergus Henderson classic) poached whole in milk and served on a bed of pulses. The only thing to watch out for is that different animals taste different, for a light and silky liver go for a lamb or veal liver, for a slightly gamey flavour venison liver is delicious and of course the livers from almost all poultry are delicious. Give it a try!
Dinner: Bone marrow on toast.