Recipes: Liver Mush & Hog Lights Stew

These are genuine down-home recipes, taken from The Treasury of White Trash Cooking, by Ernest and Trisha Mickler.

LIVER MUSH

• 1 hog liver, cut up, washed and picked clean of the membranes
• 3/4 cups of coarse ground cornmeal
• Salt & black pepper
• 1 Tbsp thyme
• 1 Tbsp sage
• 1 tsp flake red pepper

Cook liver in salted water until tender. Drain and mash to a paste. Make a sluice of the liver and one cup of the liver juice. Put in a pot and bring up to a boil while adding the cornmeal, till it gits (sic) good and thick. Add seasonings. Scrape into a mold of some kind and let it get cold. Remove and slice. It’s a meal in one.

Comments: Sick. When I was a kid, my mom used to boil liver for the cat, and I can personally vouch for the fact that it stinks.

HOG LIGHTS STEW
(“lights” are the lungs and the liver of a pig, cooked together)

• 1 set of hog lights
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 toes garlic, chopped
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• Flour

Chop your lights up into bite-size pieces. Fry down in a heavy pot with the onion and garlic till it is brown. Add water to cover, salt and pepper, and stew till tender. If it’s not thick enough for you, use a little flour to make it thicker. Spoon that over rice and some Scratch Backs* on the side, and you’re fixed.

* Scratch backs are pig skin and attached fat, salted, rolled in cornmeal, and fried. They turn out very crunchy, thus the name “Scratch Backs” – they “scratch your back” going down.

Angela Lansbury Smells Like Street People?

The original page where the odoriferous opinion copied below was posted, http://www.street-people.com, appears to be offline, but the cached version remains, so I clipped the pertinent portion and edited it for punctuation, along with correcting the spelling of Landsbury Lansbury. The essay is a rambling affair about New York City, which goes so far as to categorize the smells of various street people, and then goes even farther, endeavoring to fit Ms. Lansbury into one of those categories.

Clearly, this individual has never smelled the likes of “UrineMan,” up close and personal, as Index (fistofblog.com) and I have. That old graybeard was “Grade-A Street People.”

I think the dude is way offbase, without ever having had a whiff of Eau de Angela Lansbury, myself; how can you assess the smell of any one person while standing in a crowd on the streets of a major U.S. city – the major U.S. city – of all places? Mark Stewart, aka “Stew” brings the conundrum, here, into focus, with a lyric from his commissioned tune “The Big Game.”

It’s got loneliness and guts
And Frank Sinatra’s cigarette butts
And the riddle of the drinks
It’s perfumed, and it stinks.

(Mark Stewart, incidentally, composed and performed the tune “Come Home Gary” in the Spongebob episode “Where’s Gary?” You may listen to Stew’s “The Big Game” over at Fist Of Blog).

Enough rambling. Here’s the excerpt from the now defunct streetpeople.com, where our Stinkguru poser gives his opinion on A.L.–

I went out to dinner and walked around New York enjoying the nightlife. The hotel was in the theatre district and as I walked back, a huge crowd had gathered by one of the theatres, so we went over to see what was going on. It seems the actors and actresses from the show where leaving and stopping to sign autographs, so I stood around to see if we saw someone famous – or if it was someone from The Lion King [so as] to take them in the alley and cripple them, hopefully ending the show’s torture of people with insipid songs. Gracefully emerging from the side door was Angela Lansbury who many of us thought was dead, but a star nonetheless of classic movies like The Manchurian Candidate, Broadway musicals where she originated one of the roles in Sweeney Todd, and TV where she bored us to tears as that uppity bitch in Murder She Wrote. I don’t know how they ended that TV series but they could have won an Emmy award if they had her killed, not just the character, but her in the shows final episode. Still a star is a star and I snapped a quick picture. Her body guard kept the fans at arms length which I assumed was for her safety until she walked past me to get into her car. It was not intentional but I caught a whiff of Angela Lansbury aroma. Just like a teenage girl is over-scented more than a cat in heat, Angela Lansbury has an aroma and it was not Chanel No. 5. It was not old person smell – that is a mixture of medicated creams, cat, and aggressive application of flowery perfume – it was that damp smell. Angela Lansbury smells like street people.