Stine Writing and Miniatures

Poetics: Exploring the senses in Food Poetry – Liver and Onions

Poetics: Exploring the senses in Food Poetry
https://dversepoets.com/2024/08/20/poetics-exploring-the-senses-in-food-poetry/

 I’d like you to explore atleast ONE of the five senses in food poetry. It can be the taste, the texture of a dish or its aroma that fills the kitchen. It can be an experience you had while cooking for the first time. 

Liver and Onions

An important job for a teen with ambition
Taking orders promptly
Serving them correctly
Each day holding a special recipe

Thursday comes
and the plates come out hot
Brown smooth textures
Beneath the tearful petals
Steam carrying a tantalizing smell

Maybe just one taste
To enjoy the pungent onion
atop the firm meat
Just one taste
of liver and onions

One small bite
Brown and firm, yet soft
Mealy textures that lay on the tongue
Visions of raw organs enter the mind
Liver and onions now in the napkin
never to be eaten again
by a teen with ambition

©2024 CBialczak

I wrote this because when I was a teenager I worked at a Greek restaurant. The food was phenomenal and every Thursday the restaurant was packed with a line out the door, everyone wanting liver and onions. I must have served over 500 of those meals in my time working. Walking, while carrying the hot plates, the steam would waft back and it smelled so fantastically delicious! One day I just had to find out if the taste was as good as the odors coming off the grill and the plates.
Fast forward about two minutes…
I almost threw it up rather than politely swallowing the very popular meal of the week!

15 comments

  5. So funny, Christine! And weird to me that at a Greek restaurant that would be the dish everyone wanted. I don’t eat meat, so it sounds disgusting to me, but I can understand the scent of the meat with the onions would be enticing.

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  6. Liver and onions was my nemesis as a child. My father forced me to eat it, even when it had gone cold after I had stared at it for an hour. I stopped eating meat when I was a teenager, and now just the thought of liver and onions turns my stomach. The same applies to steak and kidney pudding. Your poem appealed to me, Christine, as you can imagine.

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