When I am taking care of my sometimes dog, Tootsie, I buy liver sausage and rub it into the folded layers of the gigantic chew bone she has so that when I leave she is fussing over the bone instead of howling because I have left her. So from time to time I have liver sausage in my refrigerator. I don’t eat the stuff even though I want to because I never have soft white bread in the house.
And in order to eat liver sausage I need soft white bread. And lettuce and while I usually have lettuce in the house, I never have white bread. But I had to buy a loaf of bread to make bread pudding and I coincidentally had liver sausage left from a recent visit (actually braunschweiger, I am unclear on the difference) and lettuce. The perfect storm.
The preferred lunch of my grade school years was the liver sausage sandwich. No butter, no mustard just iceberg lettuce on Wonder Bread or whatever cheaper equivalent my mother bought. Somehow, though, throughout the prevailing years of my adolescence and early adulthood, my father demonized liver sausage as too much fat, and the liver itself being the filtration system of the body, was packed with toxins. So having deeply engrained psychological aversion to it I haven’t eaten it much, if at all. Even if I still love the taste of it.
So this was going to be a real treat. I cut all but 2 slices of the loaf into cubes and toasted them thereby guaranteeing that I wouldn’t eat more than one sandwich. And then I made it.
It was good, don’t get me wrong, but the damage my father inflicted on my mental image of liver sausage lingers. Every mouthful was conflict. And I’m not sure that was worth the calories.
