Food
Exotic Foods
Probably it was because Pop was a butcher, or maybe Mom would ask, but Pop would occasionally send home cuts of meat that weren't generally popular. Every so often we would have brains, or tripe, or lung, or one of the other organs. We had calf brains more frequently than the others, and that would have been only once or twice a year. After cooking them. Mom would then chop them with onion and salt and pepper, and serve them cold, as an appetizer, in the same way she would serve chopped liver or chopped eggplant. They were good. Really. (In looking through some Jewish cookbooks we saw that a popular method for serving brains is to scramble them and serve them with eggs. Well, now we know a second way to serve them.)
Our memories are hazy about how some of the other items were prepared. Et believes that lungen, lungs, were baked with a pastry covering, sort of a "lung Wellington". We didn't see that method of preparation in the cookbook; the preferred method seems to be to serve them in a stew, or to chop them and use them as a filling for kreplach (a dumpling served in soup) or for strudel. Really. Other meat dishes that Mom would prepare at times were: milz, the spleen; vamp, tripe, the lining of the stomach; kishke, the intestine; and ptchav, calves foot jelly, one of Mom's favorites.
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