ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Last week my boss’s secretary, who is from the east coast, was telling me all about how they sell Boar’s Head liverwurst at Hen House market. Liverwurst is one of those foods that sounds completely awful, especially considering its dreadful name: liver, which most people think sounds terrible anyway, and wurst, as in, the worst. And, I mean, it is made from mashed organ meats. So I added it to my 101 things list as a potential candidate as 62) Try a new food I may not like, such as liverwurst or tripe. As far as I knew, the only thing liverwurst had going for it was that Chester Cricket from A Cricket in Times Square liked to eat it. And what does a cricket know about delicatessen meats?

Anyway, yesterday I was at the grocery store by myself and I suddenly thought of the conversation we had had about liverwurst on Friday and I found myself walking over to the deli counter. I looked in the meat case. I had no idea what liverwurst even looked like. “Do you have liverwurst here?” I asked the lady behind the counter. She indicated a pale creamy-white colored tube-shaped item in the case. I was mildly appalled when I looked at it.

“How much do you want?” she asked.

None! I thought. “A quarter pound,” I said.

“Sliced or just a big hunk?” she asked.

Neither! I thought. “Sliced,” I said. It was like I’ve been ordering liverwurst all my life!

She gave me a small package filled with slices of something that did not look that unlike bologna, which comforted me a little. I don’t particularly like bologna, but it isn’t terrible.

I didn’t know how I should eat liverwurst, only that it’s something New Yorkers apparently eat all the time, so I purchased an onion bagel to put it on, since I felt that seemed very New-Yorky. When I got home I put it in the fridge and did not look at it all day. I did, however, consult some websites, which helped me determine that the traditional liverwurst sandwich has onions on it, which made me decide it was all right to eat it plain on a bagel. Today I became ravenously hungry around 3:00 PM, so I put three slices of the liverwurst on a half of the bagel. Sort of an open faced sandwich type of thing.

Despite my misgivings, liverwurst turned out to be the best organ meat product I have ever tasted. It tastes a little like a cross between chicken vienna sausages and bologna, only better because it makes a much more ideal sandwich and it lacks the stigma of eating tiny tubes of processed meat byproduct from a can of half-congealed gelatin. It would be terrific with mustard and bacon on a kaiser roll. I’m not going to get LIVERWURST 4 LIFE tattooed on my body or anything, but it is safe to say I love it.

You know what sucks, though? I bet it is really, really bad for me and it’s probably the kind of thing I will only be able to eat every once in a while. That is sad, because right I want to eat it every day for two weeks.

So from liverwurst I take the life lessons that a) sometimes a think you think will be terrible actually turns out to be delightful and b) sometimes it is worth eating unhealthy things when you find them delicious.