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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Please, what is the significance of the term ‘chopped liver’? A certain section here uses it quite frequently and I have waited and hoped for context to solve the riddle for me, but my patience has run out. What the heck do you mean by it?
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Carpal Tunnel
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When one is being ignored, the complaint is, "What am I, chopped liver?" supposedly from the nature of chopped liver as a bland side dish in Jewish cuisine. This is frequently the case here when someone posts the answer to some burning question and the thread goes on for some time as though the question hadn't been answered. Then someone else posts the same answer and everyone comments on the appropriateness of the answer. The person who had posted the answer originally might comment on being chopped liver.
One man's chopped liver is another man's pâté.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear dxb: I am equally unfamiliar with implications of "chopped liver', except that I doubt
that many in U.S. would regard it as a delicacy. I still remember when it was discovered
that raw chopped liver would greatly benefit victims of pernicious anemia. Taken with ice
cream it was dramatically therapeutic. Now the idea of chopped liver inciuces instant nausea.
But I am not an initiate of the mysteries of the current use of the phrase.
Incidentally, liver used to be considered a delicacy. I thought "offal" referred only to the
less appetizing left overs - the guts,glands, and worse. Which reminds me of having read
somewhere that sailors long ago had discovered that eating the bilge rats would cure
scurvy. Rats can synthesize vitamin C in their adrenals, apparently. Yum, yum.
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Carpal Tunnel
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and here we have an example of Faldage being treated, almost instantaneously as it were, as chopped liver. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Really, tsuwm. Ya coulda made some neutral comment saying you weren't sure either and waited for another couple like that till someone else came along and explained it all and *then, "What am I, chopped liver?" Then the lovely ASp could drop in and say, "You'll always be pâté to me."
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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oh, I know--but it was too tough to wait (and risk losing the chance); not a choice I was prepared to make so early in the day.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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OK, that was very clear, thank you very much Faldage. I get the picture now.
The OED includes liver and kidneys in its definition of offal, by the way, despite descibing it as waste stuff etc. I like good quality liver, but I understand it can raise cholesterol levels and that has become an issue.
Regarding rats, I recall reading that:
a) They were used by some hardy souls to supplement the meat in the diet on naval vessels in particular.
b) Some sailors specialised in catching them and sold them to others.
c) The practice was forbidden by most naval authorities on health grounds.
I hadn't heard the suggestion that they would fend off scurvy.
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Carpal Tunnel
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A mother and daughter team has come up with a cookbook as a companion work to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. It is a collection of recipes for meals mentioned in the books and includes several recipes for miller, as the beast was known on the table.
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Dear Faldage: you reminded me of a cartoon long ago, showing two prisoners chai;ned
in a dungeon, each knawing a rat bone. One aesthete says judgematically: "A good rat,
but not a great rat."
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