Offal: A Global History (4 page)

Dinuguan
blood sausage or stew (sometimes known as ‘chocolate meat’ because of its rich, dark colour) is a typical Filipino dish that contains pork intestine and ears, served hot and spicy. Indonesian
sambal goreng hati
is highly spiced with galangal, lime leaves, lemon grass, tamarind and shrimp paste and cooked with brown sugar, and
kemiri is
beef liver cooked with coconut milk until almost dry. In India and Pakistan, where meat is eaten every part is utilized.
Kata-kat
is a heavily spiced mixed offal dish usually of goat or chicken, and in the south of India a similar ragout uses pork, known as
rakhti
. Nepalese chicken gizzards are a highly prized delicacy.

A beef offal menu outside a Tokyo restaurant, with translations for the errant foreigner.

In the Middle East couscous can be infused with offal. A medieval Arab rice dish,
Ibriing Majani
, is a gargantuan feast of
50
trotters and
20
sheep’s heads.
⁹
Iranian food is rich in sheep offal, with kebabs made of liver, kidney, heart, brains and tongue served as traditional festive treats. Knee joints and sheep’s tongues, known as
kale pache
, are traditional breakfast fare, and are served with beans and flatbread. Fish eyes – raw, boiled or deep fried – are found in traditional Lebanese and North African cuisine. Sheep intestines can be stuffed with rice. Anissa Helou recalls a Lebanon childhood eating ‘raw liver for breakfast, stuffed tripe and intestines for lunch and fried testicles for dinner’, though even she admits
to a reluctance now to experience the rubbery texture of lungs.
¹⁰
It is the freshness of the meat, still blood-warm, that she remembers most fondly. Lamb brains – fresh, lightly cooked and folded inside flatbread – are fast food, but tripe and intestine, for example, need meticulous preparation, removing veins and vessels. It can be difficult to remove all traces of the meat’s former life, but this echo can become part of the pleasure. Like a strong cheese, it is not the presence of mould that is savoured, but rather a flavoursome hint of decay.

The Balkans, straddling East and West, have a long tradition of whole-animal consumption. The Ottomans introduced
shkembe chorba
, a thick tripe soup, to Turkey; it is reputed to cure a hangover. In Turkey there are specialist tripe restaurants or
i kembeci
where you can eat soup late into the night. During the Turkish feast of sacrifice, Kurban Bayrami, ‘tripe soup is made without fail in every home where the ritual of sacrifice has been observed.’
¹¹
Barbecued lamb and goat offal is sometimes wrapped in leaves and left in the embers to slow-cook; small intestines are eased over or wrapped around skewers of mixed offal which are then roasted on an open spit. In Greece
splinantero
is a spleen sausage and
kokoretsi
uses pluck (heart, liver and lungs). A similar sausage is known as
kokoreç
in Turkey, which can be served as an Easter dish.
Picti
is peppered pig’s head brawn and braised calf’s brains are wrapped in vine leaves to keep them moist. Cypriot
zalatina
brawn includes cracked pork trotters and is prepared with cinnamon bark and chillies, mixed with pork or lamb’s tongue and seas oned with lemon and vinegar.
¹²
In Russia kidneys and tongue are traditionally served braised with gherkins and sweetened with sultanas and almonds. Calf’s head with prune sauce, fried udder and brain patties are mentioned in Elena Molokhovets’s
A Gift to Young Housewives
(1861). Armenian
khash
, made from animal feet and other parts, was once a food of the very poor, but is now considered a rare delicacy among the newly wealthy. It is considered to have more caché than, say,
yerepouni
brain fritters.

Kokoretsi
is a combination of sheep’s liver, heart, lungs and fat skewered and wrapped in intestines, then wrapped again in suet and finally in more intestine. The resulting sausage is then grilled on charcoal.

The evening meal, or
iftar
, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is a time of family get-togethers and includes simple dishes of cereal, vegetables and fruit enriched with small amounts of meat and offal in particular, though lately these evening meals have become more elaborate.
¹³
The three days at the end of the fasting period, known as Eid, are a time of celebration whose traditional dishes include stewed tripe and liver kebabs, and
boulfaf
, liver wrapped in caul and grilled. The most renowned offal in North Africa and the Middle East is lamb’s head, casseroled in Algeria as
bouzellouf masli
. Arto der Haroutunian describes the nostalgic pull of the street hawkers’ ancient cry, selling roasted lamb’s heads.
¹⁴
He remarks that though they are no longer sold ready cooked, all offal parts are still widely available. Calf or lamb brains have been so long enjoyed that there is a common saying that ‘too much sheep’s brains make you sheepish’. Lamb’s head soup is popular in the Middle East, Asia and the Mediterranean. In the ancient pre-Islamic Berber tradition,
harira
soup was enriched with liver and gizzards.

An offal butchers in Iran, where offal remains a popular food. A traditional breakfast consists of sheep’s tongue and knee joints,
kale pach
, served with beans and flatbread.

Mexican
enchilada
tortillas can be filled with all manner of offal;
antojitos
(little cravings), are a popular street food and come in many forms, such as
gorditas
(little fat ones) and cornmeal pastries stuffed with spicy liver or
huaraches
, wrapped round pieces of tongue.
¹⁵
Latin America gives us
chinchulines
and chitterlings, or
tripa gorda
, sweetbreads and marinated
tongue, and ravioli stuffed with brains. Brazil has roasted offal
parts, feijoada
with pork trotters, tail and ears, gizzard and stomach stews. The Argentinian
asado
method of grilling, in which a whole lamb is spreadeagled over an open fire, has been adopted in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The
achuras
(offal) is served first, while it is still tender. In Latin America and the Caribbean
mondongo
soup is a hearty conflation of bone marrow and hoof jelly with tripe; it originated from the cuisine of African slaves in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In Venezuela tamarind and cassaba are added, and the dish is said to be so filling that it must be eaten either very early to fuel the day, or late in the evening before dancing. Offal has never fallen from grace in these cultures, and is recognized even in its most modest form for its rarity and flavour.

Elisabeth Luard in
The Latin American Kitchen
mentions ‘the bits of the pig considered unfit for the master’, which resulted in the Brazilian
feijoada
stew and fiery Caribbean pepperpot, which was originally offal-based.
¹⁶
Grenada has a traditional dish of tripe stew with onions and garlic, thought a nourishing food for children, that in Berlin or Paris would more likely be the food of the gastronome.

There are pockets of the developed West where offal is still enjoyed, not because it is fashionable, but because it remains an integral part of food culture, and that connection has never been broken. Some commentators trace a certain reticence towards variety meat-eating to its association with rationing after the Second World War. Yet societies that have kept true to offal have hardly been strangers to periods of famine followed by plenty. It is not so much affluence that has changed attitudes, but class. Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption in
The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899) links status to the ability to be seen to be wasteful. The
details of what you eat and how you prepare food are useful indicators of social standing. With the rise of a middle class, what people eat becomes a way of separating themselves from the lower orders – and the fact that offal is inexpensive and uses all parts of the animal associates it with lower-status living.

Offal can excite extreme reactions. Nowadays in much of the West people tend to love it or hate it. Queen Victoria reputedly spooned up roasted bone marrow every day of her life. Some find the very mention of offal satisfying, exciting, even erotic. To divide the world into those cultures that still eat offal without hesitation and those that are markedly less enthusiastic is perhaps too clear a distinction. Yet reticence to eat offal – apart from liver and, to some extent, kidneys – has increased in the West along with the gradual emergence of an affluent middle class. A desire for separation from those of lower status meant that what people ate became an important indicator of class distinctions. Food became polarized into what was robust and traditional, on the one hand, and on the other finer cuisine, eaten by finer folk.

Historically offal was a natural part of the cuisines of America and Europe: chitterlings, a dish of German origin made of the intestines of pigs or other animals; potted meats; brawn and faggots wrapped in caul, the lacy membrane surrounding the inner organs. Europe’s long tradition of eating offal forms part of the bedrock of American cuisine. Regional offal consumption survives across Canada and in the American South in particular. Minorities in America, Australia, New Zealand and throughout developed Europe have kept the art of offal cuisine alive, enriched by each new wave of immigration.

John Wirgman, bone marrow scoop, 1748–9, silver. This double-ended version allows the savoury fat to be extracted from both large and small bones.

Today America is perhaps the world’s least enthusiastic consumer of offal, but it was not always so. Early settlers – German, Dutch, Huguenot, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Jewish, Swedish, African and English – brought with them their disparate culinary knowhow. The often harsh conditions and lack of refrigeration prohibited wastefulness. Settlers had to carry food on long treks into the new territories, but game offal could be foraged en route, including beaver tail, turkey, bear and buffalo in particular, which could be salted, pickled or smoked as a means of adding interest to basic supplies. Black puddings and various boiled suet puddings might be wrapped in intestine or caul. German and Dutch settlers brought with them a predilection for pork, introducing stomach, soused or marinated parts like pickled pig’s feet, and scrapple (a loaf of scraps bound with corn meal).
¹
Native Americans bartered offal with settlers, buffalo
tongue being of high exchange value. Tongues could be salted and thousands of buffalo were killed for their delicacies alone: ‘only the choicest parts were taken. The tongue, hump ribs and fleece fat were always included, as well as the marrow bones, and generally the gall and liver’, explains Hiram Martin Chittenden in
The American Fur Trade of the Far West
.
²

Exhausted hunters, too hungry to wait until they had got back to camp and built a fire, might eat the tenderest morsels raw. Others enjoyed the intestines and might swallow them by the yard, practically without chewing, though these were more usually lightly boiled.
³
Borrowed from the Native American diet, pemmican – a small cake made from dried meat, berries, dried fruit and bone marrow – was a survival food. It was adopted by fur traders and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers.

Advertisement for foie gras by Leonetto Cappiello,
c.
1928, with the crowned golden goose against a sumptuous red background, smiling down at the tinned pâté.

In the last 50 years offal has continued to be eaten as a regional speciality and is sometimes culturally specific, with fried brawn sandwiches in the Ohio River Valley, the Yiddish lungen stew, gribenes (chicken crackling) and chicken livers, scrapple among the Amish, and the typical Southern and Midwest dishes of gizzards and hog maw (stomach). Holding a barbecue, meat cooked in a pit, was a popular means of celebration in the Southern states and slaves might be given unwanted scraps of offal to supplement their meaner fare. Chitterlings became closely associated with the cultural identity of African Americans, a symbol of survival and pride. They are a marginal choice today, and though there may be core support for chitterlings, the survival of the practice of eating them relies in part on its shock factor.

The same is true of testicle eating. Regional Testicle Festivals in the
USA
started up in the 1980s.
⁴
Some organized events feature turkey testicles alone, as in Byron, Illinois, and some specialize in other types, as with the Testicle Festival in Oakdale, California, which celebrates bulls’ testicles. They are sometimes served raw, but are more often boiled, sautéed or breaded and deep-fried.

There are also societies set up to support liver consumption. These not only try out more unusual dishes, such as liver mousse with puréed blackberries at the Regina Liver Lovers’ Club, but enjoy traditional favourites such as liver and onions:

Liver lovers tend to be older people who have rural roots – and mothers who knew how to cook it: soaked in milk, dipped in flour and quickly cooked . . . The
U.S
. produced 108,771 metric tons of edible liver in 2010, but it ships 89% overseas, most to Egypt.
⁵

Creole style is inspired by classic European cuisine whereas Cajun stems from a more rustic tradition, but both adapted to the abundance of ingredients that the new continent offered, barbecuing, grilling and smoking offal and adapting dishes such as oxtail soup by adding spices and a sweet tomato base.

However, the surplus of livestock in America in the late nineteenth century meant that cheaper prime-cut meat became available to all. Jack Ubaldi’s
Meat Book
(1991) describes how America became ‘a nation of muscle-meat eaters [that] could afford to throw out the innards and other exotica’. Offal could be set aside, particularly as it was associated with hard times.

Australian Aboriginals are reputed to have sought out offal to find essential fats in the intestines of marsupials and emus, and the highly saturated fat from the possum, which was eaten raw.
⁶
In the lush coastal areas the organs of a large seagoing mammal, the dugong, were another fat source.
⁷
Today Australia produces large quantities of offal as byproduct of its vast meat industry, yet the majority – apart from what is used in their meat pies, which are legally permitted to contain blood vessels, snouts, tongue roots and tendons – is exported to Asia, with beef diaphragms being shipped to Japan and sheep’s eyes to China.

As late as the 1970s offal was still being widely enjoyed in Australia, and so it is only recently that the stigma of its ‘hoogoo’ or
haut gout
(high taste) has been felt. Some explain this reticence as a desire to assert national identity, and to separate from recent waves of Asian immigration. Offal eating becomes marginalized, eaten by the rest of the population only in ‘ethnic’ restaurants; then, in a cycle mimicking the European and American experience, it is gradually taken up by fashionable society as a new and exciting culinary possibility. However, in New Zealand, though Maori consumption of bush offal may have greatly reduced, in the country as a whole, which has relatively less immigration than in Australia, European offal staples have retained their nostalgic hold.

Some avoid
andouillettes
because of their scent of excrement; others prize this dish of coarsely chopped pig offal encased in small intestine or colon, forming sausages served hot or cold, and originating from eastern and northern France.

In the West we tend to think of France as the heart of refined haute cuisine. From the time of Charlemagne (
c
. 742–814), where meat was available it would have been roasted on a spit, often with offal parts skewered along with carcass meat. The poor were more likely to use offal to add flavour to cereals and vegetable soups. This food of the poor was sold on the street, and its vendors, or
restaurers
, gave their name to the first soup shops, or restaurants, in sixteenth-century Paris. Pig offal sausages,
andouilles
, and the smaller ones known as
andouillettes
, are made from coarsely chopped tripe, pork parts and chitterlings, and are recorded by Alexandre Dumas in his culinary dictionary of 1873.
The Ladies’ New Book of Cookery
, published in 1852 in New York, recognizes both the culinary authority of French cuisine and its ability to use all parts of an animal:

The herbivore dugong, sometimes known as the sea cow, prized for its high-protein fat by Australian Aboriginals. In India its oil was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

It is generally admitted that the French excel in the economy of their cooking. By studying the appropriate flavours of every dish, they contrive to dress all the broken pieces of meats.
⁸

Offal permeates everyday meat dishes in France:
pot-aufeu
, into which all parts might go;
coq au vin
, thickened with the chicken’s own blood, which some say was first eaten by Julius Caesar;
alicot
, a mishmash of poultry bits, giblets, head, feet and wing tips from the Languedoc, cooked in goose fat then casseroled with vegetables in stock;
boeuf à la mode
, a fifteenth-century dish in which beef is lardoned with strips of fat pork skin and stewed in a liquor thickened with calf’s foot; calf’s liver in all manner of ways; sheep’s kidneys cooked in wine, perhaps with juniper berries, and served on toast; calf’s head in a vinaigrette; calf’s feet cooked in white wine
à la menagère
(for the thrifty housewife); brains with black butter; sweetbreads,
ris de veau, ris d’agneau
; ox tongue stewed with butter, mushrooms and mustard and so on, through its tripes and offal stocks, until we reach all the pâtés of France with goose foie gras to the fore. In Nice and Marseille
pieds et pacquets
are lamb trotters and tripe stuffed with salt pork and cooked slowly in a wine and tomato sauce, though nowadays trotters are sometimes omitted from the dish.