From Messages from My Father, by Calvin Trillin:

["Metaphor or Recipe?" could be one of those internet quiz games.]

When I gave a speech at a Jewish community center in the Chicago suburbs, I called it 'Midwestern Jews: Making Chopped Liver with Miracle Whip.' After the speech, someone came up and said that the title was an interesting metaphor. 'It's not a metaphor,' I said. 'It's a recipe.' That was how my mother made chopped liver.

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["Pruning One's Family Tree"]:

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When my mother was elderly, she jettisoned any number of relatives from my father’s side of the family, the way some older people who have moved into more compact quarters shed excess furniture. I don’t mean she stopped seeing them; she withdrew recognition of them as cousins. “How’s Cousin So-and-so?” I might ask on a trip home, only to be told, “Those people were never related to us.”