From “Chopped Liver for Gentiles” by Gordon Lish, published in Esquire, 1 March 1977.
Go get your scissors. Here goes.
Take chicken livers. Take as many as you want— because I never consider proportions. Engineers measure ; the nephew gropes, with eyes closed tight to better illumine the inner vision. So take chicken livers. Rinse in cold water. Put chicken fat in skillet. Salt it. Get good and hot and add liver. Sauté twelve minutes with cover on. Set drained liver aside, scarf out skillet, ladle in bacon grease (you heard me!), again get good and hot, then lay in your sliced onions. At instant they threaten to brown, remove onions and drain. Hard-boil yourself some eggs. In total number, use one and a half as many eggs as you used livers. Ditto with the onions. (Don’t talk to me about sizes: I can’t think at this point.) Now what you have is your sautéed liver and your translucent onions and your hard-boiled eggs. All this goes into your wooden chopping bowl that is supposed to be roomy enough to let you really go to town without later having to hose down everything in sight. All set? Now here’s where you separate the nephews from the tantes. In goes beer, a couple of good splashes; in goes more chicken fat, nothing stingy; the same with butter. Follow with dry mustard, garlic powder, pepper, salt, chive, a notable dash of cinnamon (you heard me again, hoss!), a shy spritz of Worcestershire, a little ground dillweed, and you’re in business—start chopping. But you’re not chopping up a bowl of gold unless you went heavy on the ingredients I didn’t tell you to go light on. That means I’m looking for an expansive nature when you reach for the mustard and the garlic and the chive—salt and pepper being one of life’s large problems every nephew must solve for himself.
…Now here’s the rest. If you can’t get corn rye bread to accompany this epistle from God, I’ll understand—but I will also know they’ll never count you in when they number up the chosen.
Biblioklept 