Neese's Liver Pudding

I think about the column below with a degree of sadness. Part of the inspiration was a much-loved columnist at the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer who is no longer with us. When he wrote about liver pudding and asked for comments, he was amazed by my story. He wrote back to ask how a marriage could survive between a good Southerner and someone who doesn't eat meat.

After I got my column published, probably 14 years later, I received an angry response from a reader. The letter writer, who knew my husband but didn't know that he knew him (there are differing surnames in our mixed marriage!), informed me that in my column I had offended North Carolina, my husband, and one other thing that I can't remember. The writer also contended that I'd said "liver pudding" when I meant "liver mush," and he claimed that I'd been confused about the identity of the animal who had contributed its liver. I think that the letter writer and I became friends, or at least reconciled, through subsequent e-mails. Only a few years later, I learned that he had died.

I really hadn't meant to offend.
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My name is Alison, and I’m married to a Southerner.

Here’s proof, 200 proof, or at least 150: I recently let the spouse out of the house to forage for food, and he came home with two bunches of collards. At least he didn’t cook them with fatback, but, boy, did he cook them, and cook them, and cook them: He sautéed -- nay, saturated -- them first in liberal glubs(cq) of oil, then drowned them in water and flogged their pitiful corpses with at least two hours of brutal boiling.

I must take responsibility; I have only myself to blame. I knew what he was when I married him -- a vile murderer of some vegetables, and a complete bigot when it comes to others -- but love stole away my senses.

Perhaps I considered the potential for low humor, for I fastened on a lover of liver pudding. Liver pudding is a joke even on its home turf, North Carolina. And as I stood in supermarket lines with that slimy, grayish, lumpy rectangle of pig organ and denatured grain -- wrapped in clear plastic, to trumpet its presence to the world -- I would draw my hair closely around my face, hunch my shoulders together and look to the ground. Perhaps no one would recognize me, and perhaps I wouldn’t be able to hear the snickers. But hear them I did; people laughed and pointed at me and my liver pudding.

The spouse cooked it; he cooked it every day. Every day at breakfast in our North Carolina years, the pathetic boy would sizzle up two eggs and two or three slices of liver pudding, or LP, as I called it to avoid having to speak the ugly phrase. Over high heat, he’d let his eggs brown and toughen round the edges (they really snap, crackle and pop!) and his LP shrivel and turn a ghastly blackish-gray.

Day after day, month after month, year after year I watched this unsavory display of devil-may-care cooking, this gut-wrenching show of cruelty to the idea of food. And I watched. And finally, I snapped.

I, who hadn’t eaten meat in 10 years, suddenly saw myself lunge in desperation at his plate and snatch up a small, ragged triangle of the grotesque meaty mush. Yes, I did it -- I popped it into my mouth. I chewed. I swallowed.

Oh, it was foul. Burned and evil. Gaack. Ewwwww.

But my greatest agony was that I had abandoned my principles and only suffered for it: No moment of gloriously guilty pleasure would carry me through the rest of a plodding, virtuous life. No, of all the sublime and toothsome foods with which the world tempts the pure palate, I chose to stray with liver pudding.