Offal: A Global History (2 page)

Jan Baptist Weenix,
Pig’s Carcase
, 1647–61, oil on canvas.

The lower ranks of society not so indulged might have eaten tripe,
¹³
blood or the heads of sheep – which Juvenal
calls, with a touch of bathos, ‘a feast fit for a cobbler’ – but their recipes go unrecorded. Mireille Corbier imagines the aspirations of a slave of the lowest order, who longed to taste again the sow’s womb he once ate in a tavern.
¹⁴

In the ancient world offal was widely eaten, and it could be something to aspire to, a dish suggesting luxury. During the Renaissance there was a revival of interest in extravagant offal dishes, and the recipes of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French chefs used offal in fantastical cuisine. Not until the recent revival for nose to tail eating in the West has offal been so highly regarded.

What might the term ‘offal’ include? The
Chambers Dictionary’s
definition sounds a little less than enthusiastic: ‘waste or rejected parts esp. of a carcass: an edible part cut off in dressing a carcass, esp. entrails, heart, liver, kidney, tongue etc.: anything worthless or unfit for use.’
¹
Other edible innards not specified here include connective tissue, bone marrow, lungs, spleen, sweetbreads, testicles, udders, tripe, heads and the features thereof (brains, eyes, cheeks, snout or muzzle and ears), skin, tails, trotters, lard and blood. Offal is sometimes thought of as inner organs and viscera alone, but I include all edible exterior parts. In markets across the globe offal is openly displayed alongside livestock and carcasses. However, the colourful posters displayed in some Western butchers’ shops, showing the division of available cuts, rarely include offal, suggesting there is sometimes a need for diplomacy – even secrecy – about eating such body parts.

The terms we use can be gently euphemistic, as in melt or milt for spleen; lights for lungs; brawn or headcheese for brains; crackling for crisp skin; and prairie oysters, mountain tendergroins, cowboy caviar, rocky mountains, fries and swinging beef for testicles. Bath chap refers to pig cheek and lower and sometimes upper jaw; chitterlings or chitlings are intestines; haslet is a loaf of pig offal; chine is backbone; faggots are offal balls; and Gaelic drisheen is a pudding of sheep intestine stuffed with blood and cereal.
²
Sometimes one body part is presented as another, as when testicles are termed sweetbreads (the correct term for pancreas or thymus gland) or kidneys in the case of cockerel’s testes,
rognons blanc
in French.
³
Sometimes the nomenclature for offal is disturbingly graphic or biological, as with udder, penis, birth canal and bladder. All sound like they come from some familiar doggerel, replete with medical, pornographic and
Carry On
film-style suggestiveness. Offal can seem both childishly smutty and too grown-up. Even the terminology used by the butchery trade can obfuscate, as when penis is termed pizzle.

Most probably used to advertise available cuts, this wooden model of a butcher’s shop,
c.
1850, is now a reminder of how meat was once commonly sold.

Paul Sandby,
Any Tripe or Neats or Calves Feet...
, part of a series of etchings,
Twelve London Cries Done from Life
, 1760. Ragged and careworn, the vendor wheels his barrow of calves’ feet and other parts, calling out for business.

These lists are not exhaustive, but demonstrate the size and range of the subject. The ingredient parts form a complex chain in the anatomy of beasts and inevitably recall our own physical, meaty make-up. It is possible, it is said, to eat all but the feathers or fur, talons and teeth. All but the squeal of the pig.

Perhaps there is some inherent meaning in the word. itself. ‘Offal’ suggests what falls off or away after the animal is slaughtered and what is left after the butcher has taken his prime cuts: the inner parts of an animal, that stew of slippery organs, glands, vessels, blood and tissue. Thus the term can suggest something that is less important, being only a byproduct of the butcher’s art. Hieatt and Butler, in their medieval cookbook, quote a recipe from Arundel where the verbal connotation is latent: ‘Take
garbage
of capons, and of hennes, and of chekyns, and of dowes, and make hem clene’ (my italics). This suggests that offal is inferior to other meat and should be discarded as of no value, even as something dirty and disease-ridden. Shakespeare refers to rotting bodies as offal in
Hamlet
(
II
, 2): ‘I should have fatted all the region kites/With this slave’s offal.’

The word ‘offal’ is etymologically linked with
afval
in Dutch, the German
Abfall
or
Offall, avfall
in Norwegian and Swedish,
affald
in Danish and
abats
in French. All of these words imply rubbish or animal waste and do not necessarily refer to food.

The word is a gift to the comedian. A number of offal-related words, such as giblets, sweetbreads and tripe, have become part of the comedian’s lexicon; our laughter betrays our unease. In Yorkshire fat men are sometimes affectionately called Giblets. The heavy metal bands Offal and Necrophagist draw on offal’s associated vocabulary and imagery in their lyrics, with ‘Fermented Offal Discharge’ a hit for the latter. Offal News, a political and economic blog, and
TV
Offal
, a
UK
Channel 4 sketch show of the late 1990s, borrow offal’s in herent sense of subversion to suggest satire. It can also be a term of abuse. To be ‘de-offaled’ has become a metaphor for distress, more graphic than ‘gutted’. The word ‘offal’ is also used for the leftover scraps in glass-cutting and for fabric remnants too small to be of further use.

The sound of the word is rounded and soft on the palate, phonetically minor in key. It could be said to make a seductive shape in the mouth: the open vowel; the gentler sound of the ‘ff’; the pleasing closure of the ‘l’. Nonetheless, the accident that ‘offal’ can be homophonous with ‘awful’ contributes to some of the negative or comic associations the word invites.

Ruth Dupré,
Butchery
, 2010, sculpture. Heavy, glistening glass ox tongue forms fall from a butcher’s block.

The varied textures of tripe, from silky seersucker to mohair blanket.

Raw offal can seem more raw, more visceral than other meat, reminding us of a time before cooking, when early man tore into bloody prey. It suggests the crazed or defiant, like Diogenes and his alleged diet of raw flesh and creepy-crawlies. The challenge of offal comes alive in a description of learning to cook in China. Fuchsia Dunlop is determined to enjoy the ‘silken strands’ and ‘tender flesh’ of fish eyes, yet cannot help but empathize with her father’s reluctance as he masticates ‘rubbery goose intestine’.
⁴

The extra-meatiness of offal is often part of the appeal. Next to the chewy, gristly, bloodily robust offal, other meats can seem insipid. Some avoid offal because it seems uglier than other cuts; conversely, some baulk at the idea of eating the inner parts of cute animals that remind us all too easily of ourselves and our own fragile bodies.

From tongue and beak in Sichuan Province to gizzard stew on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, from elegant Parisian
bonnes bouches
to spicy cartilage in the dust bowl of Calcutta, nose to tail eating is widespread. Offal is a food which represents the most elevated
haute cuisine
and yet also celebrates the ingenuity of the poverty-stricken. In France offal is still referred to as
les parties nobles
(‘the noble pieces’). Italians deem offal
la cucina povera
, the food of the poor, its many age-old and more refined dishes springing from necessity, as in Douglas Houston’s poem ‘With the Offal Eaters’: ‘putting each beast killed to its full use / Their wives chop offal finely twice a week.’
⁵

Most of the world eats offal. The cuisines of the Middle and Far East and Africa have always appreciated its qualities, while the great chefs of North America and Europe may rejoice in new opportunities to raise awareness of the culinary potential of these meats. The question remains whether ideas about ‘real’ food, advocated by American chef Chris Cosentino and Pierre Orsi in France, represent anything more than a fantasy – albeit an ambiguous and highly charged one – for the West. It may be that these ideas fail to affect day-to-day food choices. Moreover, there is a marked distinction between those who dress offal up in creamy sauces or combine it with non-offal meats as if to mask its identity, disguising its natural form, texture and scent, and those who prefer, like Fergus Henderson in his St John restaurant near Smithfield Market in London, to lay
offal bare: with, say, suckling pig’s brains served simply and without camouflage.

The writer and philosopher Roger Scruton describes food as having ‘meaning, not just nourishment’. Because offal takes many forms, and attitudes to it vary in different cultures and within different income groups, its meanings are enmeshed. Its recipes, tastes, smells and textures, history and cultural context all exist against a backdrop – in the affluent West at least – of uncertainty over whether this is stuff we ought to eat. In cultures that until recently enjoyed offal, the better-off classes are beginning to reduce their consumption of it, while – conversely – many a gourmet or chef in the West encourage us to return to offal. Attitudes to offal, and remembered impressions of it, can be peculiarly complicated, but then so is offal itself. The rub here is between the physical sensations of taste, smell and appearance via our lips, mouths, taste buds and eyes, and our moral tastes or preferences. The food writer Tara Austen Weaver struggles with the idea:

I think offal is far more intimidating than simply meat. Offal is foreboding, the nasty bits that many people prefer to avoid. In some way it is the essence of the animal – intestines, kidney, heart.
⁶

The ways in which offal-associated vocabulary is used and the metaphors that surround it are illuminating. The fourteenth-century theory of bodily humours has invaded our ways of expressing internal life, forging a connection between physical organs and their hidden functions: one can be splenetic, choleric, liverish, phlegmatic or even just sadly melancholic. I may be lily-livered if I am gutless, heartless when I am not heartfelt. One suffers from heartburn or a chill on the kidneys. The edition of
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase
and Fable
of 1870 sourly informs us that veins or kidneys ‘were even by the Jews supposed to be the seat of the affections’.