When I was in HS I worked in a grocery store that had a butcher,I help get items sometimes, there was a tray of fresh beef liver. To get it out there was a weird look thing to grab the corners. Grossed me out.
I loved braunschweiger - still love the taste - until I discovered what a liver was. My mother once said I used to happily eat liver, too, but I have no memories of that.
In Germany in 2009 or so dad was thrilled to find liver dumpling soup at a restaurant and happily ordered it.
In a cruel twist of irony, I love liver, but can’t eat it because it’s bad for me: Too much iron. Dietary iron is usually a good thing for most people… except for we fraction of a percent with hemochromatosis.
Beef, calf and chicken liver used to be regular parts of our meal rotation growing up. I continued to cook it when I grew up and lived alone. But I quickly discovered that people I dated or married were not fans of the smell or taste. So I stopped making it. It’s probably been going on 15-20 years since I fried beef or calf liver at home. Last time I did, the cooking smell that clung to everything for several days really turned me off so I’ve never made it since. I’ll still eat it if offered, but I ain’t cooking it. I continued to make chicken liver pate for a little while but not in the past 10 years. Since I’m the only one who’ll eat it, I prefer to just buy it prepared now.
Sometime in the early 80s my mother made liver for dinner. It did not go well, and it never happened again.
When I worked at Safeway in the late 90s, it was extremely rare I would ring up a package of liver for anyone. The meat department didn’t even put any out in the case, you had to ask for it.
My mom made liver for dinner in the 80s when I was a kid. She told us it was steak. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I realized I didn’t hate steak.
One of my favorite dishes my gf makes is her Liver Stroganoff made with either turkey or calf liver.
It’s funny, for my family it was livers and pipicks, never hearts. I’m not sure why, but this was Bubbie cuisine and you didn’t ask questions 
. She would do a chopped chicken livers with onions fried in schmaltz and chopped hard boiled egg that I can still taste in my mind and she has been gone for more than 30 years.
My mother would occasionally make either fried or grilled calves liver, but I don’t think I have ever made it myself.
Money was tight when I was growing up, and my mom would often make, as my siblings affectionately nicknamed it, “chicken crap stew”. I loved chicken gizzards, and the pupiks (literally bellybutton in Yiddish) were the best part.
Fast forward to when I moved out, and a trip to the grocery store. Found a package of pupiks in the meat section, but was confused at the label - chicken hearts? Blech! Must be a mistake.
Realization slowly dawned - wait a sec, chickens don’t have belly buttons!! (yes, I was quite stupid)
tldr: chicken livers are tasty, pupiks are even better (but only if you don’t know what they are) 
I don’t know how that is possible but I think we grew up sharing the same grandmother.
Mmmm, lamb kidneys (also beef, but especially lamb)! Used to be readily available in stores. My dad couldn’t stand the smell, so my mom would cook them when he was traveling. Good stuff.
When I was in elementary school, it seemed like liver and onions found its way on the dinner menu quite often, as both my parents liked it, and made me sit at the table until I ate a portion or it was time to go to bed. Both my parents grew up in farm country. When the pig/cow/chicken/turkey got butchered, everything got eaten. My mom likes the poutry offal better than my dad.
Still don’t want any, but my parents are far away and they can cook it as often as they want.
My dad has a friend who hunts and didn’t know what to do with the goose livers. Goose liver pate is a totally different thing, and that I will eat.
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. My mother loved liver and onions (no bacon), although her taste was not shared by any of us kids. Also, being Irish-American, she cooked the hell out of it. Since she was of the “you must clean your plate before you leave the table” school, I spent hours staring at my plate before I could choke enough down and escape. That didn’t enhance my feelings toward it. Since that time I’ve tried it occasionally to see if my taste has changed, but although I can tolerate it I don’t like it much.
On the other hand, I loved chicken livers even when I was a kid. When we would get a whole chicken with the giblets packed inside, it was a treat to fry up the liver, heart, and gizzard in butter and make a small sandwich.
I also liked liverwurst, and a baloney and liverwurst sandwich was a common lunch. Unfortunately I can’t get it in Panama, even at the Kosher supermarket. When I go back to the Bronx I will buy some, but recently I haven’t been able to find it in my neighborhood, which is now mainly Latino.
My father would always say “I don’t eat anything that you have to boil the piss out of first.” Words to live by.
>sigh<
My mom had a kick-butt kosher-style chopped liver recipe that is amazing but it makes 1-1/2 to 2 pounds of the stuff and it’s just me here and that’s WAY more than I can eat before it goes off.
Also, I no longer own a meat grinder, which sort of puts a crimp into the whole “make your own” thing. Great Aunt Pearl used to chop/mince meat with a gizmo you strap onto a hand and used to chop things up, but I haven’t seen one of those in decades.
AND you have the broil the liver - would you believe that when I moved into my new place there was no broiler pan in the broiler part of the oven? I asked the landlord about that and he said "yeah, they don’t come with those any more " WTF? Still wondering if I should nick the broiler pan out of the old place, but aside from being dishonest I actually don’t do much broiling. In fact, maybe we did it twice in the twenty years we lived in the old place. If that much.
It also uses beef liver, which gives a different effect than chicken liver. I’ve only encountered one restaurant ever that made something similar, that was the Belden in Rogers Park in Chicago. Alas, I here that is gone, too, now.
Is there an actual broiling element there? It’s been a good while since I’ve seen that old type of broiler – they’re typically in the oven part now, all the way on top, and that lower drawer is just for storage. At least they have been in all the ovens we’ve bought for the last couple of decades.
My broiling element is in the top of the oven, and i don’t think the pan i use is something that came with the oven, it’s just a stand-alone broiling pan that i rest on on oven rack, at the highest setting for racks.
Although… Actually, it looks just like this:
And the color matches the interior of the oven. So maybe it did come with the oven.
Goodwill always has broiler pans, but for most broiling, I just use any oven-safe pan.
Huh - I’ve used gas ovens most of my life and they have the broiling underneath. The one I currently have is electric and it never occurred to me that the broiling element might in the oven part.
We’ve only had gas, and it’s been a loooooooong time since I’ve seen the element underneath. The only oven I’ve ever had like that was my parents’ 70s or 80s oven. I don’t know when they fell out of favor or if they’ve totally fallen out of favor (maybe you still can get ovens like that), but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an oven like that.
ETA: Looks like broiler drawers still do exist, but I guess I just haven’t seen them in awhile.