As a child, my relationship with food was pretty weird stuff. There was a phase when I refused to eat steak other than if I could gnaw on the bone. I was inclined to eat my pancakes with jelly, rather than syrup, and I oddly enough picked soft boiled eggs over fried every time. Vegetables, other than carrots and potatoes, were not part of my diet, the mere smell of bananas made me gag and hot dogs reliably made me vomit despite how delicious they were to eat.
But, it was my sandwich choices which were truly strange. While cream cheese and jelly was my usual lunch at home choice and a couple of slices of hard salami on a hard roll was my go to sandwich to pack for field trips, my favorite sandwich was a simple combination of white bread, mayonnaise and liverwurst.
Yes, liverwurst.
What can I say? My mother is German.
I’m certain I can count the number of liverwurst sandwiches I’ve eaten in the last 40 years on a single hand. Perhaps the number would be greater if Debbie Klauber was still slinging sandwiches and I had ready access to her liverwurst, red onion, sliced egg and hot mustard delight, but it is what is and liverwurst is simply not something I buy very frequently.
The first of May, though, is my mother’s birthday. When I visited her the weekend before May Day and asked what she wanted for her birthday, she surprised me by saying “a sandwich.” Maybe it’s the observance of Passover at the facility where she now lives, but all she really wanted bread, preferably with something delicious in between a couple of slices.
On Monday, my sweetie made it over to Rolf’s Pork Store, an Albany institution when it comes to traditional German products, including liverwurst. He came home with a small brown paper bag containing the good stuff and got some eggs boiling. Assembling the sandwich on our freshly baked bread, with the addition of pickled onions and mustard toted home from last month’s visit to Germany, made for a birthday present that combined all of the elements that I appreciate in a gift – sentimental, homemade and consumable.
Lunch meat can be so much more than bread filler. This, I hope, was one of those times.
DelSo 
hate liverwurst but love Rolf’s! My dad took me there often when I was a kid. He also loved liverwurst but my German genes did not impart that love to me.
This made me cry.
Sometimes tears are exactly what one needs. Hope that’s the case for you. *hug*
my German Uncle Anton turned me on to it almost 50 years ago. Rolf’s array of their liverwursts is so good (but as my wife couldn’t stand the smell, I would just get enough for one sandwich (while she slept after a midnite shift). Onion and hot deli mustard on rye.