I have to thank my Facebook friend Susan Maslowski, for the motivation for this blog post. Susan insists that she is not a food expert but knows an awful lot about food and food writing. She describes her experience in this way: "I participated in a one-week cooking school at The Greenbrier in the 70s. I no longer write for the Sunday Gazette Mail, but I do a weekly column for their Kanawha and Putnam supplements". The comments on Facebook of one other person, Satine Bonet, who commented on Susan's post about Zeimni Nogi also brought some motivation to the topic. Zeimni Nogi is described as "a traditional Polish dish eaten during the cooler months, topped with a squeeze of lemon juice or served with some tasty horseradish". I suspect that in much of Eastern Europe, where rural poverty is widespread, this dish is eaten with far more horseradish than lemon juice since horseradish can be raised at home and lemons would have to imported at a price. I would be willing to try the dish both ways since I love both horserdish and lemons. Here are the succinct directions for making Zeimni Nogi according to Polish Foodies Traditional Recipes: "Polish pigs’ feet jelly is a type of aspic made by cooking root vegetables such as carrots, celery, and parsley with pork legs till it forms a jelly. This jelly is then refrigerated till it sets and is always served cold!" I have to admit that I have never eaten Zeimni Nogi or even heard of it until today, July 31, 2021. But I would love to try it. It looks and sounds fantastic if you like pickled, jellied, or unusual pork based dishes. Thank God, I grew up in a family where we "ate anything that creeped, crawled, or flew too low over the supper table". I also grew up in a country store and was literally carried home from the hospital through the door of the country store since we lived in the same building. I like to say that my parents carried me home from the hospital at three days old, set me on the counter, and told me to greet customers until I was big enough to do something more. Growing up in the store and, later, being allowed to travel quite a bit, attend Upward Bound, and expose myself to many things, I learned to like a lot of foods and other experiences which many people avoid.
We sold, frequently ate, and sometimes made a variety of either pickled or jellied products including souse, pickled pigs feet, pickled bologna, pickled eggs,and pickled wieners. Let me also say here for the record that I know full well that Zeimni Nogi is not pickled. It is jellied. But several of the other foods, both pickled and not, which I am about to discuss are jellied. All these foods were brought to mind by my learning about Zeimni Nogi. I still love all the pickled and jellied foods I was raised on to this day but rarely eat them anymore because of a well managed history of high blood pressure. I also love to eat organ meats from hogs, especially what we call "lights" better known to the general public as pork lungs. I used to love souse so much that for a year while I was working for a company called Vision Quest and stationed in Franklin, Pennsylvania, I had a souse sandwich once a week for lunch. One of my assignments at that time was that one day a week I supervised a crew of juvenile offenders who were doing community service by helping the city maintenance foreman to pick up recyclables all over town. The offenders' reward for their work was that they got taken, along with me, to the local grocery store deli for lunch. I ate so many souse sandwiches there that I could walk into the store, head toward the deli, and one of the deli workers would open the door to the cold cut cooler and begin to slice souse. I remember the best homemade souse I ever had which, sadly, was not made by my mother. I was working as a salesman in Logan, West Virginia, and worked with a female friend whose best friend and surrogate mother was an 80+ year old African American woman who lived in Main Holden, an old coal camp near 22 Holden which was the scene of a famous coal mine disaster. This old woman agreed to make and share the souse if I would buy the hog heads which I did. This old woman made incredible souse which I still remember nearly 30 years later and I only got to eat her souse once in my life. I was also raised on pickled eggs which are best pickled in beet juice as are pickled bologna or pickled wieners. You add the boiled eggs, wieners or bologna to the pickled beet juice in a big mouth gallon jar and wait at least a week before you sample them. They are awesome done that way and the longer you pickle them the better they taste. But getting back to pork organ meats, they are all great but nothing is better than pork lungs, "lights", boiled with some kidneys, spleens or "melts", hearts, livers, and potatoes in a great big stock pot. They are incredible. Then you throw in some fresh green onions, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and cornbread and you have a feast.
In Western North Carolina, they make an organ meat based food which they love and even have festivals for called Liver Mush which is made with pork livers and other organ meats along with spices and cornmeal. Here is a simple recipe for Liver Mush: "pig liver, pig head parts such as snouts and ears, cornmeal and seasonings".
It is commonly spiced with pepper and sage. The meat ingredients are
all cooked and then ground, after which the cornmeal and seasoning is
added. Then, as I understand it, the Liver Mush is placed in loaf pans to congeal, sliced, and later recooked on a grill. The truly fascinating aspect to eating Liver Mush is that it is generally eaten in two ways, usually as sandwiches: 1) with mustard; and, 2) with grape jelly. Now that is an interesting contrast and as, I understand it, just like Alabama and Auburn football there are devoted fans on both sides. It is also my understanding that North Carolina state law actually regulates the minimum percentage of pork liver which must be in Liver Mush in order for it to be legal to sell. By law in North Carolina, the product must consist of at least 30% pig liver. I can't wait to eat some good homemade Liver Mush and Zeimni Nogi.
