Better The Devil You Know

In the spirit of all things recessionary I set myself a little challenge yesterday: go into Tesco, buy the cheapest meat you can find, bring it home, cook and eat it. In the interest of comparing like produce I limited my selection to raw meats in the chiller section, though perhaps there was an element of self preservation here too. Not even a global economic meltdown will get me eating meat from can. With these carefull parameters in place I ended up at the till with a half-kilo of pork liver, at a total cost of e1.57.

The first thing to notice about the product was that it was double-sealed. This was ominous. It is a wrapping tactic I use myself with dirty sports gear. I'm not quite sure of the precise health and safety reasons in the context of fresh meat but an obvious one that quickly came to mind (and nose) was the smell.

Now I'm not squeamish when it comes to food, and neither am I a total novice in the consumption of the more visceral inards of an animal (lightly poached goose gizzard is a personal favourite) but the odor of bodily function that accompanied the piercing of the second layer of plastic gave me pause for thought. Pork liver smells like...well actually, it smells precisely how you would imagine a pigs liver smells.

Assuming you can get past the smell, what are you signing up for with pork liver? It has higher levels of iron than other meats and so may not be the ideal introduction for a novice liver eater - I've had subtler fillings. With little connective tissue in the meat it can quickly become tough and dry as well (you are by now beginning to understand the reason for its bargain price). It's a meat that needs a fairly robust sauce to mask the flaws as it were.

Despite some work on the trendier fringes of celebrity cookery, we have to a great extent lost the culinary skills required to make these less enticing animal components more palatable. In embracing a more frugal cusine we do well to learn lessons from our forebearers who exhibited a greater resourcefulness when meat was rare, little was wasted and was never far from spoiling.

"Devilling" is by now almost an arcane term, originating in the late middle ages when new spices and herbs came from the east. It refers broadly to any variety of foods prepared with spices or strong seasoning and is distinguished from curry probably by its emphasis on vinegar and mustard. One would hazard a guess that the satantic reference was evocative of the sharp and fiery flavours of the sauce.

Here's my super cheap recipe for Devilled Pork Livers on Toast:

Ingredients:

2 pork livers
Tablespoon plain flour
Tablespoon paprika
Knob of butter
1/2 and onion (finely diced)
Splash white wine vinegar
Tablespoon Tomato Puree
Teaspoon dijon mustard
Tablespoon creme fraiche
Half Lemon
Few sprigs of flat leaf parsley

Crusty Bread
Splash of olive oil

Method:

1. Place the flour, paprika and pork livers in a sealable bag and coat the livers well in the mixture.

2. Soften the onion in the butter over a medium heat.

3. Turn up the heat and add the livers, cooking for two minutes on each side.

4. Add the vinegar to the pan and reduce for a couple of minutes.

5. Stir through the tomato puree, mustard and creme fraiche, allowing the sauce to bubble slowly over a low heat until the pork is cooked through (the braver among you may like to leave a subtle pink trace through the meat - pork liver can quickly turn tough).

6. Season with salt and pepper, add a squeeze of lemon juice and chopped parsely and serve on thick slices of grilled bread drizzled with olive oil.