Liver and Bacon with Onion Gravy

There's a smell that belongs to this dish and no other. Onions, cooked slowly in butter until they've turned dark and sweet, meeting the mineral tang of liver hitting a hot pan. It fills the kitchen in a way that polarises a room. You either grew up eating this or you didn't. If you did, the smell is a homecoming. If you didn't, I'd like to convince you.

Liver and bacon is deeply unfashionable, and I say that with affection. It doesn't photograph well. It won't win any beauty contests. Nobody is putting it on a restaurant menu with a foam and a smear. Good. That means it belongs to us, the home cooks, the people who know that the best food is often the least glamorous. A few quid's worth of lamb's liver from the butcher, some streaky bacon, a pile of onions, and a pan of mash. That's it. That's dinner.

The trick, if there is one, is speed. Liver wants a hot pan and two minutes per side. No more. Pink in the middle, with a crust that tastes of the bacon fat it was fried in. Overcook it and you'll understand why people think they don't like liver. Cook it right and you'll wonder why it ever fell out of favour. The onion gravy is the thing that holds it all together: slow where the liver is fast, sweet where the liver is savoury, dark and rich and exactly the sort of thing you want pooling into a mound of buttery mash on a cold Tuesday night.

I wrote it down in the notebook last winter: liver, bacon, mash, rain on the window. Right food, right evening.