Just curious: when was the last time anyone reading this bought liverwurst or sat down to enjoy a liverwurst sandwich?

If it weren’t for the fact that liverwurst is Hannibal Lecter’s favorite food, I’d be ready to declare it hopelessly old-fashioned, terminally unhip, eaten only by benighted denizens of the upper Midwest, where immigrants from Germany and northern Europe settled in the nineteenth-century.

I can remember liverwurst sandwiches from my childhood (which I was probably given because my parents knew how nutritious liver is), but I haven’t bought any liverwurst in decades because the blandness of commercial versions is only livened up by the chemical afterburn they leave in your mouth. In addition, since the liver is the organ that removes toxins from the blood, I wouldn’t want to eat any liver that didn’t come from healthy, organically-raised animals. So it’s a treat, finally, to have some liverwurst worth eating.  Appropriately for such an old-fashioned sausage, the recipe came from Fritz Sonnenschmidt’s old-fashioned charcuterie book.  As I’d hoped, the recipe went a good way to redeeming the other faults of this book.

While Braunschweiger is often enriched with milk and eggs, this version gets all its richness from pork liver (45%) and a generous portion of bacon (25%).  It’s richly but delicately seasoned with white pepper, allspice, cloves, sage, marjoram, nutmeg, and ginger, and garnished with pistachios.  Unlike the commercial products, which are all poached, this one is hot-smoked, as Braunschweiger should be, to add a little oomph to the meaty flavor.

When serving, ideally liverwurst needs some acid to cut through the fat and a little sweetness to balance the salt.  You get both from tomato, which makes it a staple on liverwurst sandwiches in this country.  I also like it open-faced, on some toasted rye bread, with a little sweet & spicy German mustard, and slivers of red onion.  Or one could serve it French style, with some sharp Dijon mustard, maybe a few capers, and sweet gherkins on the side.   For dinner, we preceded our liverwurst sandwiches with a salad of spring greens, roasted beets, blood orange sections, and fresh sheep’s milk cheese from Prairie Fruits Farm and accompanied them with a hearty split pea soup.  A German rauchbier would have been perfect to wash it down, or maybe just a wee nip of a nice, smoky Scotch.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m working on recreating a spreadable Calabrian salami, without Calabrian pork or Calabrian peppers–or much of an authentic recipe to guide me. Since I’m making things up here out of whole hog, I figured I might as well take further liberties and make a batch with bison meat or “buffalo.” Something about the rich red color and the fiery depths of the chilis seemed to call out for a red meat like grass-fed buffalo. Besides, since buffalo were native to this area long before we were, and since local farmers are now raising them again, I want to try and work more buffalo meat into my sausages.

In coming up with a basic recipe, I’m sticking to the proportions of the recipe that Jason Molinari found: a little more than 2 pounds meat for every pound of peppers. Here’s a detailed, updated recipe for my first, experimental batch:

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Say what? I came across nduja at the Borough market in London, at a small stall specializing in products from Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot. Looking more like a rough, reddish-brown lump of dough still needing a second rise, nduja is a smoked, spreadable salami, whose featured ingredient is the peperoncini or chili peppers of Calabria. The strange name supposedly comes from the French andouille, back in the day when France controlled this part of Italy.

I had never had anything like this. First, a creamy, spreadable sausage from Italy, whose nickname is “the red Nutella”?! But the rich red color of this spread is a warning of the fiery depths of flavor that await. When I came up for air, I was gasping for breath and had to have MORE. It was love at first bite. Now this is a sausage for barbecue lovers and chiliheads! While Italian food generally avoids too much heat, Calabria is apparently nuts about its peperoncini. The town of Diamante is home to L’Accademia Italiana del Peperoncino (The Italian Chili Pepper Academy), which sponsors a five-day festival of chili peppers every year, where you can enjoy grappa al peperoncino di Calabria, granita al peperoncino, crema di cacao al peperoncino, and baci di Casanova (“Casanova’s kisses”), dark chocolates with chili centers.

Back home now, I’m determined to reproduce this mouth- and eye-watering treat. Internet searches only turned up confusing descriptions of how this sausage is made, so I turned to Jason Molinari in Atlanta, who maintains a great blog on cured meats (particularly Italian ones), and he turned up and translated this recipe:

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