My Dad’s Chopped Liver

Anna Polonsky

Chopped liver, « foie haché », is a dish I grew up eating in France, a classic recipe from the Ashkenazi Jewish repertoire. My dad likes to substitute the traditional schmaltz with oil, making this cholesterol bomb a little lighter. The port wine is also his addition, unsurprisingly. We eat it with pumpernickel bread, challah or matzah bread.

I like how weird, exotic but also delicious and comforting this dish is. As always with Eastern European Jewish cuisine, it is Poor Man’s feast, made of the cheapest and most unpopular ingredients. 

My dad, as most Ashkenazis after the Shoah, never wanted to hear about religion but he’s continued to cultivate his family culture and raised me in the love of Jewish food, music, and history. I moved to the US ten years ago and am always the one organizing the holiday dinners for my adopted NY family. We don’t pray, but each time, we revisit the holy tales and try to find learnings for the modern days, around a table full of traditional foods and wine. Those familial celebrations have definitely contributed to shape my vision of food, something that should be simple and generous, a medium for conversation and transmission without ever being pretentious or cerebral.