“I remember that we cut the livermush in blocks and wrapped them in plastic,” eldest daughter Carolyn Hunter Johnson told me. “We sealed the plastic on a clothes iron turned upside down. My job was to wrap the blocks in paper.”

Today, Hunter’s Livermush produces 20,000 pounds every week for customers of stores in five counties. Two mornings a week it sells directly to the public at its plant on Poteat Road in Marion.

On a much smaller scale, Fitzhugh McMurry, along with his cousin, Joe Workman, make about 30 pounds of livermush every week in the back of his country store. McMurry Store and Farms is on NC 18 in Cleveland County, at the only stoplight in Fallston. McMurry keeps enough fresh livermush, sausage, bacon, hams and sidemeat in his meat case to satisfy a swarm of regulars and any others willing to drive to the country for a slice of heaven.

McMurry invited me into the back of his store where he already had 25 pounds of lean, meaty shoulder scraps and liver tenderized in a tall stewpot. While I watched, he ground the meat and returned it with the hot broth to the stove to get ready for the second step in the process: adding the cornmeal and spices to make a savory, mouthwatering mixture.

Like many of his generation, McMurry was born at a time when many families still grew and preserved vegetables and raised all the meat for the family table. The recipe is his mother’s, but like many great country cooks, he doesn’t need any measuring cups. He used his years of experience to gauge the right amounts of red pepper, black pepper, sage, salt and brown sugar; no two batches ever exactly alike. Using a long wooden paddle, he slowly worked in white cornmeal a small handful at a time.

“Listen to the bubbles,” he said. “When they start talking back to you, it’s ready. Hear it?” Sure enough, the bubbles began to hiss and pop with steam and the mixture began to pull away from the side of the pot. He spooned out a taste for me, and poured the rest into a large rectangular pan for cooling and slicing.

The next day my husband volunteered to drive the 30 minutes back over to Mr. McMurry’s store to buy a large block of that livermush. It fried to a crunchy golden brown and disappeared quickly along with the scrambled eggs, hash brown casserole, and biscuits and molasses I served for supper that night. For us, that’s hog heaven.