Picture it: Cleveland, Ohio, 1983. A little boy is 9 years old. His life is good and he is happy: he has an Atari 2600, Return of the Jedi had just opened, and Robotech is about to forever alter his life. And while he watches the A-Team on TV, he eats his favorite thing: gooseliver sandwiches. Sometimes he wonders why they are called that, but his mother, whom he trusts and knows would never lie to him, assures him that "They just call it that ... like hot dogs."
But one day he accompanies her to the West Side Market. In the midst of sides of pork, piles of beef organs, and goat heads, the awful truth suddenly dawns on him: gooseliver is actually the liver of a goose. The horror! The horror!
He never eats gooseliver again. And it's a pretty long time before he has a hot dog again, either.
Until this summer. That little boy, my friends, was Foodgoat. Foodgoat insisted he was over his organ-phobia. So we bought half a pound of gooseliver at what may be the exact same stand that where part of Foodgoat's innocence was so devestatingly lost.
I spread the ground up gooseliver (also known, I think, as a pate or liver paste) on bread and a sandwich. No wonder it was Foodgoat's favorite! It's delicious! In the French version, pate de foie gras, the even more buttery ground up liver comes from a maltreated, force-fed goose (and rings up at $63 for 1.5 lbs at Galucci's).
And Foodgoat? He did eat it. But it turns out he's not quite as over his childhood trauma as he thought.
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