"Good" anytime

Moving to the country. Gonna eat a lot of ... sausage? And liver pudding? Sorry, no peaches!

Today, we're looking at Neese's Country Sausage/ Neese's Liver Pudding cook booklet (ed. Beth Laney Smith, undated, but it mentions a newspaper column from July 1971, so probably from the early '70s).

I love the cat snoozing in front of the old-style cook stove. You know that's the warmest spot in the house, and maybe she can snag some pork product if she's lucky.

There are plenty of standard sausage recipes (Spanish rice, sausage with apple rings, sausage-stuffed mushrooms). My real fascination is for the liver pudding, something with which I am completely unfamiliar. Also known as livermush, it's apparently "an aromatic blend of liver, corn meal and spices."

And it's apparently shameless, willing to join the list of things-that-are-clearly-not-pigs-in-blankets-but-going-by-that-name-anyway:

I guess strips of liver pudding in hot dog buns at least have actual pork and bread products, but there's no way I'd call them pigs in blankets. (Also, I love the way that the olives on picks in that picture look like ripped-out Muppet eyeballs. Miss Piggy has a waaay darker side than the show lets on.)

With pudding in the name, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that so many recipe titles sound dessert-y.

Of course, here, pudding is used in the older sense of the word, which originally referred to sausage. And custards can be savory too, but when I hear of pudding or custard, I don't exactly imagine something loaded with liver and onions, then served with mushroom or horseradish sauce.

And when I think of stuffed French toast, I tend to picture fruit (or maybe cheesecake!) sandwiched in fluffy Texas toast rather than liver pudding in pumpernickel.

The weirdest creation by far, though, may just be this dinner offering with a straightforwardly savory name:

I can get past the fact that Liver Pudding à la King substitutes liver pudding for the more typical chicken. That's just what booklets that advertise a specific product do-- substitute their chosen ingredient for the one everybody's used to. Getting mad at that would be like getting a rooster and being pissed off that it woke you up with all that crowing in the morning.

I'm kind of incredulous about substituting hard-cooked egg wedges for mushrooms. Why add eggs when the booklet spends so much time emphasizing how much protein is already in liver pudding, and when the addition makes stirring the mixture an ordeal if one is "to avoid breaking egg wedges"?

The real kicker, though, is the carby component to soak up all that cream sauce. There are plenty of popular options: rice, noodles, bread. Liver Pudding à la King is too special for those, though. Check out the end of the ingredient list. It's served over Shredded Wheat biscuits! And if you check the end of the recipe, they're not just any shredded wheat, but "hot, crisped, Shredded Wheat biscuits which have been salted, if desired." I mean, who hasn't salted and baked Shredded Wheat so it can absorb a creamy liver-and-egg sauce?

If you want to try to defend the cereal and egg choices by saying Neese's was trying to create a breakfast equivalent of Chicken à la King, this was listed in the "Suppertime" chapter.

In short, this was going to be a weird book, whether or not liver pudding was involved.