09. Cleanse
Fegato. Liver. Raw, it is unnerving: the blood-purple hue, the fatty veins running through it, the way it wiggles on a chopping board.
Cooked, it becomes transformed. My mother relished it, my father, too, especially when sautéed with black pepper and sweet onions. In Il Talismano, this simple recipe is called Fegato di vitello alla veneziana. Ingredients: olio, sale, pepe, cipolla (onion) and fegato (calves' liver). Process: Lasciate cuocere pochi minuti a fuoco forte, affinché resti morbido. Cook only a few minutes over high heat, so that it remains soft. That's it. Fast, and nearly impossible to screw up. Just don't overcook it.
Nutrient dense with protein, iron, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and antioxidants; if you don't have issues with cholesterol, liver is quite good for you.
And yet it is an organ which cleanses. Is it not filled with toxins?
Ada doesn't offer any wisdom here. (Because liver was once an everyday food and no one thought to ask?) I found an answer online in the Radiant Life Blog: "While it is true that one of the liver’s functions is to act as a filter for toxins, it is not a storage place for them. Once the liver has identified the toxins, they are marked to be excreted via the intestines or kidneys."
Ah. So it cleanses by judiciously tagging the bad and sending it off, and retaining the good.
How brilliant is this? If only our minds could behave as efficiently. Maintaining a happy psyche can be difficult: so many unhealthy thoughts. There is much there, in memory. Maybe cleansing here, too, means to sift through, eliminating what no longer serves us, but retaining the important moments--the thought morsels which make up the good in us, enrich us, make us who we are.
Un Assaggio : (A further taste, of the language)
Italians have an expression "rodere il fegato" meaning to eat away at you, to really get you in the gut. Rodere: to gnaw or erode. For example: Ma ora ti sta facendo proprio rodere il fegato. But now it is absolutely eating you raw.
"Ci vuole fegato" is another common expression: It takes guts.
MY MOTHER SEWED OFTEN when I was a child. She’d use the kitchen table as her work area, and I remember helping her move the patterns and pins and spools of thread temporarily into the living room until after dinner when they would be moved back. Two deep, coffin-length wooden trunks in the basement held remnant fabric of every hue and texture: velvets and satins, stiff chintz, cottons and slippery polyesters. The velvets were my favorites: I loved running my fingers against the smooth pile. Moth-repellent balls lined the bottom of the trunks releasing an odor which seeped into the fabrics and filled the basement in a blast whenever the trunks were opened. To this day, whenever I encounter that pungent scent, I'm back at my mother's side, her hand holding up the wooden lid as we gaze into the mosaic of folded softness.
The garage was my father’s domain. Tool boxes filled with metal objects pointy and blunt. It all smelled a bit oily and solid. Containers of nails and screws, saws and drills. A wonderland of possibility.
My father possessed Rube Goldberg’s inventive style. Any technical, mechanical, or plumbing problem could be solved with enough ingenuity (and tape and various miscellaneous things found in the garage). It was a rare challenge he would turn down, and although his solutions were often less than perfection, most of them admirably did the job, at least for a while. From him I learned to approach challenges with an engineer’s openness. His fixes were beautiful not so much in appearance, but rather in a way that caused some friends to gasp, Wow, your dad did that? He’d walk on the roof (two stories up), fixing the rain gutters and collecting trapped leaves. A couple times (when my mother wasn't looking) I walked up there with him. If I believed I could do something, he let me try.
My mother was creative in a visual, literary, musical sense. She was drawn to artful things, to poetry, intelligent discussion, to the dance of fabric, the light cast by its shimmer. She spun stories that my girlfriends at the time never forgot, poking fun—viciously and consistently—but only at herself. From her I learned about story-telling, about laughter, about striving to make something beautiful, which meant as close to perfection as possible, especially when your name was on it.
And she cooked, of course.
And after she died, my father, whom I’d never seen prepare a meal, took over, cooking a simple, splendid dish for himself each evening until he died, too, a couple years later. Preparing a meal, no matter how basic, and sitting down to eat it ... was what one did. There was hope in this.
