“Everything tastes better on a Ritz,” or so the advertising slogan goes. When I was growing up, that certainly was the case in my home. There were only two types of crackers found in our kitchen pantry, Ritz and Triscuits. In those days, there wasn’t the various flavors and sizes of Ritz Crackers available today, or if there was, not in my mother’s kitchen. Saltines and all their variations would occasional show up on the shelf, but usually because they were needed for some recipe Mom wanted to try (and never repeat). They were never used for snacks.

During Passover there’d be boxes of matzos, but shortly after those eight long days were up, these would disappear. During Passover, breakfast and lunch would center around the crumbly matzos instead of the sandwich bread we ate the rest of the year. Butter and jam on a cold matzo was never as satisfying as it was on a piece of golden-brown toast at breakfast, and bologna with mustard and mayonnaise never seemed as fulfilling on matzo as it was on airy white bread.

In an attempt to compensate for the difference between bread and matzos, Mom would make egg salad, which she always called deviled egg, and chopped liver. The egg salad was a simple blend of hardboiled eggs, Best Foods mayonnaise, French’s mustard, and Leslie salt. The eggs were diced with an old, pot-metal egg slicer that half a century later is still regularly used in my kitchen. The egg salad was always spread too thin for my taste, but I guess since it took more work to prepare than opening the bologna package, Mom wanted a little to go a long way.

The real highlight was the chopped liver. She’d fry diced onions in a copious amount of butter and then add the chicken livers. When they were mostly cooked and everything was seasoned, the whole conglomeration was passed warm through her old hand-crank, Universal-brand, cast-iron meat grinder clamped to the pullout cutting board. (For some reason she always referred to the cutting that pulled out from the kitchen counter like a drawer as a bread board, even though she never cut bread or anything else on it.) She used the finest cutting plate on the grinder so the chopped liver was actually a coarse puree. It was great on a section of matzo, although hard to spread without breaking it. It was also great on a Ritz cracker the rest of the year, if I could coerce her into making some “out of season.”

One day when I obtained a whole, warm, recently “harvested” lamb liver, I used part of it for some chopped liver, and my first thought went to putting some on a Ritz cracker. To call the concoction chopped liver is a bit misleading since it really was a very smooth liver mousse. (It would be interesting to someday make a liver mousse from a moose liver.) I adapted the recipe from the one I use for chicken liver mousse that itself was adapted from a recipe in Victoria Wise’s American Charcuterie cook book. The quantities given below produce about 700 g (1-1⁄2 lb) of mousse, enough for a large party’s worth of amuse-bouches. (I like a lot leftover to snack on.)

The assembly of the amuse-bouche starts with cutting 1-cm (3⁄8-in) thick slices of the mousse from the terrine or loaf pan. I then use a 2-cm (3⁄4-in) round, fluted Japanese cutter—I like the Japanese variety better than the normal fluted cutter because the flutes are a bit bigger—to carefully cut fluted shapes from the mousse slices. These are simply sandwiched between two of my “Ritz” crackers for service.

The mousse sandwiches looked a bit lonely on the serving plates so I accompanied each one with a little onion chutney.