Chicken liver is cheap, chic, wholesome and probably prophetic.

Chicken livers are divisive. Some folks - myself included - can't get enough of them. Others are unable to see past their role as an internal organ filtration system for a bird's body. There are also a startling number of people with childhood horror stories in which they were forced to eat badly cooked, grey, gritty chicken livers under the guise of "good for you".

Far be it from me to trample on anyone's formative food trauma, but as a liver lover I feel honour-bound to make the case for this much-maligned meat. No ingredient should be condemned for crimes committed against it in kitchens long past, and the chicken liver's role as a biochemical sorting system is not nearly as nasty as the naysayers imagine.

Yes, it is an organ that processes substances carried to it in the blood, but it is not hoarding toxins like a sinister sponge. Harmful compounds are broken down or prepared for removal. By the time a chicken liver gets onto a plate what remains is prize, not poison: heme iron, folate, preformed vitamin A, B vitamins, selenium and zinc, all packed into one of the most nutritionally dense pleasures available to the omnivorous...