Liver Mush Recipe? A Carolina thing.

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chef k-dude

Smoking Fanatic
Original poster
Mar 11, 2015
546
404
Central Virginia
Any of our Great Carolinians have a recipe for Liver Mush? My wife always picked up some Mack's when in NC but says the food lion in Durham isn't carrying it anymore. It's so much better than Neeses in our opinion.

I would also love some local knowledge, especially in the Durham area as to who still carries it in the store. Mack's the company seems to exist, but they dont want to be communicated with much. No web site, Facebook doesn't have any content, packaging has no contact method. I found a phone number and it did ring to a voicemail that sounded like it was them. I left a message to see if they would call me back. The address on the packaging just comes up at an intersection, they dont even show up as a business on Google. 6126 McKee Rd, Shelby, NC 28150.

So I thought, "hey, I can cook! And I also make my own boudin with fairly decent results". But the web is stuck on basically one or two recipes, regurgitated/plagiarized likely from an old recipe. In fact I saw an old handwritten recipe picture that looked like the basis of almost all of the recipes. Should contain pork (they used to use the head and other scraps), pork liver, seasonings especially sage and corn meal or corn meal and flour. I dont think I can replicate Mack's exactly though, it has pork liver as the primary ingredient but also has snouts and spleens!

The vast majority of them have "1 pork liver" in the recipe. In the modern day, this is not a measurement. And there are no reliable measurements for a pork liver I can find. When I buy pork liver for boudin, it usually comes in a bucket to the butcher in pieces, not the whole liver, so I dont think even the meat departments can really answer that question. The size of a pork liver depends on the slaughter weight of the pig, about 2-1/2% of the total weight is what I read. if a pig is 250lbs at slaughter, that could be a 6lb liver!

Any butchers out there?
 
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Any of our Great Carolinians have a recipe for Liver Mush? My wife always picked up some Mack's when in NC but says the food lion in Durham isn't carrying it anymore. It's so much better than Neeses in our opinion.

I would also love some local knowledge, especially in the Durham area as to who still carries it in the store. Mack's the company seems to exist, but they dont want to be communicated with much. No web site, Facebook doesn't have any content, packaging has no contact method. I found a phone number and it did ring to a voicemail that sounded like it was them. I left a message to see if they would call me back. The address on the packaging just comes up at an intersection, they dont even show up as a business on Google. 6126 McKee Rd, Shelby, NC 28150.

So I thought, "hey, I can cook! And I also make my own boudin with fairly decent results". But the web is stuck on basically one or two recipes, regurgitated/plagiarized likely from an old recipe. In fact I saw an old handwritten recipe picture that looked like the basis of almost all of the recipes. Should contain pork (they used to use the head and other scraps), pork liver, seasonings especially sage and corn meal or corn meal and flour. I dont think I can replicate Mack's exactly though, it has pork liver as the primary ingredient but also has snouts and spleens!

The vast majority of them have "1 pork liver" in the recipe. In the modern day, this is not a measurement. And there are no reliable measurements for a pork liver I can find. When I buy pork liver for boudin, it usually comes in a bucket to the butcher in pieces, not the whole liver, so I dont think even the meat departments can really answer that question. The size of a pork liver depends on the slaughter weight of the pig, about 2-1/2% of the total weight is what I read. if a pig is 250lbs at slaughter, that could be a 6lb liver!

Any butchers out there?

An old post, I know, but it's sad to see no replies--I'm a scrapple fan and would love to try liver mush, a very old Penn Dutch food (I'm the last of my line, we were all PD).

BTW I have found scrapple/liver mush videos on YouTube; search 'McGie Homestead'. Good luck!
 
Thanks. Probably the words "liver mush" doesn't ring as very tasty. It's cousin, liver pudding sounds just as bad! A lot of people are turned off by anything liver, but liver mush is like scrapple only more liver forward, and pork liver is very mild, a lot like chicken livers.

I just wish I could find a liver to pork meat/fat ratio to start working on a recipe. Not popular stuff so not a lot of modern iterations of it out there with real measurements.

Some people are weirded out by certain things. My son-in-law is oooged-out by boudin because a traditional way to eat it is squirting it right in to your mouth from the hog casing. He said, "I'm not eating nothin' that looks like it came out of a condom!". If I took it out of the casing and didn't tell him it has some pork liver in it and fried him some in a skillet, I guarantee he would love it.
 
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Thanks. I tried searching but hard to get results that are taking me to a recipe of his. I'll have to look when I have more time. Someone did post this "olde tyme" recipe in memory of him.
Scrapple.JPG


The ingredients for scrapple are right in the lane of a recipe I was hoping to find for Liver Mush and this actually gives me a starting point. I can start here and amp up the liver (my frozen packs are 3/4lb for my boudin). Thanks for the nudge! Why that didn't cross my mind..."dain brammage" I suppose.
 
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Thanks. Probably the words "liver mush" doesn't ring as very tasty. It's cousin, liver pudding sounds just as bad!

Ha, try to come up with something better. 😀 'Scrapple' was somebody's winning entry for a dish that contains bits and pieces of everything and lots of offal too. In Italy I ordered a plate of 'tripa'--the waitress daughter of the proprietor beamed with pride as it was their specialty. Tripe in tomato sauce. I'm telling you, it was good!
 
Any of our Great Carolinians have a recipe for Liver Mush? My wife always picked up some Mack's when in NC but says the food lion in Durham isn't carrying it anymore. It's so much better than Neeses in our opinion.

I would also love some local knowledge, especially in the Durham area as to who still carries it in the store. Mack's the company seems to exist, but they dont want to be communicated with much. No web site, Facebook doesn't have any content, packaging has no contact method. I found a phone number and it did ring to a voicemail that sounded like it was them. I left a message to see if they would call me back. The address on the packaging just comes up at an intersection, they dont even show up as a business on Google. 6126 McKee Rd, Shelby, NC 28150.

So I thought, "hey, I can cook! And I also make my own boudin with fairly decent results". But the web is stuck on basically one or two recipes, regurgitated/plagiarized likely from an old recipe. In fact I saw an old handwritten recipe picture that looked like the basis of almost all of the recipes. Should contain pork (they used to use the head and other scraps), pork liver, seasonings especially sage and corn meal or corn meal and flour. I dont think I can replicate Mack's exactly though, it has pork liver as the primary ingredient but also has snouts and spleens!

The vast majority of them have "1 pork liver" in the recipe. In the modern day, this is not a measurement. And there are no reliable measurements for a pork liver I can find. When I buy pork liver for boudin, it usually comes in a bucket to the butcher in pieces, not the whole liver, so I dont think even the meat departments can really answer that question. The size of a pork liver depends on the slaughter weight of the pig, about 2-1/2% of the total weight is what I read. if a pig is 250lbs at slaughter, that could be a 6lb liver!

Any butchers out there?
I'm originally from NC and Moved to Wisconsin 26 years ago and since there is no Liver Mush here and I could only get it when I went down to visit I always brought some back with me. I tried to find a recipe for months even talking to some people that made it and nobody would give up the recipe. So I started experimenting and this is what I came up with which is as close as you can get I think except it does not have the caramel coloring but I have a solution for that, that I am going to try next time I make some. You can freeze it but cut it into slices first and fry it frozen otherwise it crumbles The hardest part was trying to figure out the ratios of Pork to liver.
 

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You can freeze it but cut it into slices first and fry it frozen otherwise it crumbles The hardest part was trying to figure out the ratios of Pork to liver.

Hey, Buckwheat! (No, really. 😊) That's what's missing from both of these recipes, and I probably wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned the crumble factor. 'Real Scrapple' at Food.com suggests a 7:3 ratio of cornmeal to buckwheat flour--that's the glue you need.
 
Thanks for the recipe! This combined with the scrapple recipe I have already started tweaking the text of will give me a good foundation. I've got 2 butts I just picked up for .99lb I plan to break down and use for ground, chunk and country ribs. Hopefully I'll give this my first try soon. I think I need to process or freeze those butts by around the end of the month.
 
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Try the links below. Just searched for liver mush. Returned plenty of information to choose from.



 
Hey, Buckwheat! (No, really. 😊) That's what's missing from both of these recipes, and I probably wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned the crumble factor. 'Real Scrapple' at Food.com suggests a 7:3 ratio of cornmeal to buckwheat flour--that's the glue you need.
Thanks for that recipe. I can see that a little flour could help bind. That recipe doesn't include sage which seems to show up in nearly all liver mush recipes. Interesting that it uses ground meat. It doesn't define the meat other than pig parts and doesn't mention liver.

Thanks for the links, rjob. I did run across those in my search before making this thread. Two of them calls for 1 hog liver" which, like in my first post is not a tangible measurement to me. I found plenty of recipes like I said, but most were using the whole liver. Many specifically call for the whole liver and a whole head.

The other at least defines the liver weight but uses pulled pork. That's the only one I saw using pulled pork. Funny, they dont tell you how long to boil before using the stick blender on that one. I cant imagine using my stick blender to do this!
 
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