I haven't had liver in a very long time but do like chicken liver and especially goose liver which I ate in Hungary. I don't like gizzards or heart or anything like that though. When I made chicken soup though I would throw that into the soup as well for flavor but nobody ate it...got thrown out. Might have given it to my cats at the time but can't recall if I did or if they even liked it.
@Don Alaska " I don't know anyone who eats plain liver. " You do now. "Taste" is not a universally uniform sense, but rather one perceived by the individual. I agree liver has what I could call an unusual taste, but I grew up having no problem at all with it, and have eaten liver "plain" made in several different ways. Frank
@Chrissy Cross I'm not certain of this, but turkey gizzards, which I assume are stomachs, are single-structured unlike the multiple cavity stomachs of ruminants, or maybe other birds. I seem to recall my grandma telling me chickens swallow small gravel to grind food in their gizzards, don't know if it's so, but can say that turkey stomach is solid muscle like good steak, and when cooked in soup while the bird is roasting makes a delicious little appetizer. I have eaten chicken heart cooked the same way by my mother when I was a kid, but don't recall a stomach. Several other Slavic fares were made often: Ox-tail soup, beef tongue (pure muscle tissue, delicious!), beef brains (!?), which were fried up with scrambled eggs, and tasted chewy and rubbery; not sure if I would still find brains palatable! Frank
My mom would prepare it with onions, and I think there was a gravy on top of it. It looked pretty good, but it still tasted awful.
Yep, Ive had tongue and brains....didn't eat the brains as a child but did in Hungary, very popular appetizer. They were fried and you could dip them a sauce..lthey reminded me of fried oysters...very similar taste.
I'm a chicken liver guy. Tongues and brains turn me off big time. As did rattlesnake. I'm getting squeamish in my old age. I'm going to have fried okra,sliced tomatoes, boiled egg and shrimp for dinner.
@Bill Boggs Okra I've seen and tasted only once. It had a slimy feel to it, similar to the goo that dribbles off of raw shrimp, another of the few foodstuffs I don't care for. But, to each his own! Frank
Gizzards are not a stomach, but they are (as your grandmother said), a grinding organ, @Frank Sanoica . Chickens, and other birds, not having any kind of teeth or way to really pulverize their food, swallow it pretty much whole, and then the gizzard, which has gravel and small bits of rocks in it, will grind up the grain, or whatever else the chicken has swallowed. That is why they are such a tough, muscular little organ, and before they can be eaten, you are supposed to remove the whitish inner lining of the gizzard before cooking it. I imagine that this part is to protect the muscles of the gizzard from being damaged by the gravel in the gizzard. Chickens and other poultry that are kept penned up where they can’t get to natural rocks and gravel have to be supplemented with some, so that they are able to properly digest their food. Maybe the commercially-raised chickens are fed “crumbles” which are already crushed and then made into little pellets, and would not require extra gravel; but any farm-raised (or wild) bird needs some. I always chop up the giblets and add them to the dressing when I roast a turkey or chicken, and it adds good flavor. If we don’t eat the liver or gizzard, the dogs love eating them, and since the liver is very tender, I usually give it to Chipper.
@Yvonne Smith Great info! I suspect our family used the term "gizzard" to cover all the types of birds we consumed. I have no idea about ducks or geese, or turkeys, for that matter. The hordes of ducks and coots on the river here gulp down tiny fish whole, pretty much. For the life of me, I don't recall if my Mother cooked duck or goose stomachs, but turkey for certain, just as my wife does. Roast duck and goose were alternately prepared for the holiday get-togethers when it was not too unbearably hot & humid in the Chicago area to think of roasting in the kitchen. No one had airconditioning, and we sweltered. I believe my Mother DID chop up the stomach and heart to be included in what we called "stuffing", as it was baked within the cavity of the bird! Frank
Right on, Yvonne! They have found the remains of gizzard stones associated with dinosaur skeletons also. It was one of the first clues that dinosaurs were birds (sort of).