Offal: A Global History (7 page)

Lamb’s testicles, lamb’s headcheese, blood and liver pudding, along with rolled lamb and lamb’s breast, all preserved in sour milk whey.
Súrmatur
is a traditional Icelandic food and is also made from whale meat.

Icelandic boiled lamb’s head or
svið
.

Singed sheep’s head is one of the traditional dishes of the Buriats, a nomadic people now settled in southern Siberia around Lake Baikal. Their cuisine also includes raw liver and boiled stomach pudding.
²⁵
Traditionally, in a diet relatively low in carbohydrates and high in fat and animal protein, Inuit hunters are said to consider the liver, cut from the seal carcass and eaten when still warm, the most prized part of a kill. Inuits might offer anyone suffering from shock a slice of raw liver, chiselled from a frozen store.
Muktuk
is a dish of frozen whale skin and blubber.

Given the cheapness of offal compared with other cuts of meat, there is sense in increasing the appetite for offal, but it remains not just a conceptual but a technical challenge. The American chef Thomas Keller writes:

It’s easy to cook a
filet mignon
, or to sauté a piece of trout . . . and call yourself a chef. But that’s not real cooking. That’s heating. Preparing tripe, however, is a transcendental act.
²⁶

Offal can be difficult to prepare well, and attitudes to offal are ambiguous. Inuit traditional practice may seem primitive or authentic. American food writers may suggest that Europe is relatively without prejudice. We buy new offal
recipe books in the West, and find them challenging, even exciting, but when it comes to buying and eating offal many are hesitant. Much offal has to be pre-ordered, and even then, for some less commonly available body parts one has to go to ‘ethnic’ butchers, particularly those which have a more direct relationship with their animals’ slaughter.

Gérard Depardieu is nonplussed in the film
Green Card
(dir. Peter Weir, 1990) by the very notion of a vegetarian. His character believes that, for red-blooded men at least, the consumption of meat is essential. If meat is a must, then the meatiest meat must surely be offal.
¹

There is something masculine about offal, or so we are led to believe. It is associated with the virtues of strength and virile sexuality, but also with what is physically dirty and often less morally pure. Manly men should lack that queasiness often associated with feminine sensibility. In an episode of the American television series
Rawhide in
the 1960s, a cowboy finds shelter for a woman in a freezing prairie blizzard, deep in the carcass of a newly fallen buffalo. They are kept warm within the freshly steaming entrails.

A bullfighter may consume the testicles of a slain bull to enhance his masculinity. An association with bloody offal can suggest gross brutality. The thriller
Le Boucher
(dir. Claude Chabrol, 1970) features a character named Popaul who has recently returned from the Vietnam War. A working-class butcher, his raw, primitive self is only just kept beneath the surface. He is able to articulate an instinctive violence in terms of his butchering trade:

The murderous Popaul, played by Jean Yanne, at work in his butcher’s shop in
Le Boucher (dir
. Claude Chabrol, 1970).

I have a lot of blood – my blood doesn’t stop flowing. I know about blood. I’ve seen so much blood, blood flowing . . . Once when I was little, I fainted when I saw blood – they all smell the same, that of animals and that of men. Some is more red than others, but all have exactly the same smell.

It is this barely concealed violence that evokes a sexual response in a cultured, mild-mannered schoolmistress.

Although offal may have come to represent low-status food, its recent re-emergence as a fashionable if controversial choice is aligned to a characteristically masculine stance. In these times of greater equality between the sexes our gendered attitudes to offal could be said to reveal a sort of nostalgia for an obsolete stereotype of dominant masculinity. Being seen to enjoy offal can undermine notions of femininity in a woman. Of course, some women find offal delicious and far from off-putting and many a man feels the reverse – yet the general tendency is borne out by any ad hoc survey of responses from men and women in the West. When women say they love offal, there can be a quality of self-conscious
brio
in their assertions, a desire to confound expectations, that confirms rather than denies this suggestion.

Mixed tails, trotters and various other parts for sale, in Brixton Market, South London, on a Saturday afternoon.

In J. G. Farrell’s novel
The Siege of Krishnapur
(1973), set at the time of the Indian Mutiny, the British community is besieged and becomes surrounded by piles of bodies, referred to as decaying offal, that seem to represent moral as well as physical corruption. The initial cause of the Mutiny had been both Hindu and Muslim objections to sepoys being ordered to use forbidden animal grease on their rifles. Significantly a young English woman, who has earlier been ostracized for a sexual indiscretion, becomes adept at producing makeshift cartridges to keep the insurgents at bay, but since she makes them from beeswax and rancid butter, she effectively circumvents the initial cause of the revolt. She takes a male role, the only one able to solve a practical military problem, but her status is also that of peasant, sitting ‘cross-legged like a native in the bazaar’.

Weighing up the offal at Crawford Market in South Mumbai, 2010.

The photographer Eli Lotar’s reportage includes a series of Parisian slaughterhouse scenes taken in 1929, the trotters lined up in the street like a queue in waiting, seeming to look forward to militarism ahead. Inside the abattoir he captures severed heads of cattle, their eyes rolling as if in appeal or from above shoots men at work in the confusion and mess of killing. The contemporary artist Victoria Reynolds paints vivid slaughterhouse images, the result of a visit to a Lapp reindeer abattoir, and reminiscent of the dolour of Rembrandt’s
Slaughtered Ox
of 1655. These artists are part of a tradition that despite the flux of history suggests that this is who we are, just flesh, corruptible and fragile. Gradually in the West we have withdrawn from such truths, so that the realities of slaughter and butchery are pushed aside. They seem too primitive and at best are allowed to represent masculine virility.

A bowl of lamb’s hearts.

Butchery is a skill requiring strength and precision and a certain lack of sentimentality, both to be able to slaughter and to take on the attitudes required by such a trade. If we are seen principally in relation to our work, then to be a butcher either in the abattoir or a butcher’s shop makes demands on the sensibilities that traditionally have been seen as male. The collective noun for butchers is ‘a goring’. Butchery is associated with blood, on the apron, on the hands, the metallic smell in the air, the stains and rivulets on the floor and the cries of slaughter. Blood and the assumed extra bloodiness of offal suggest violent death and the field of battle.

The novelist Barbara Pym, writing in the 1950s, notices how men are assumed to require more meat than women in their diet, to comic effect.
In Jane and Prudence
, set in the post-Second World War period when meat was still scarce, Jane worries that the vicar may drop by while they are eating liver for supper. The cook, whose nephew is the local butcher, reassures her that he ‘shares out the offal on a fair basis, madam, but everybody can’t have it every time.’
²
P. G. Wodehouse has
Offal as
the title of a racy novel in the short story ‘Bestseller’ from his collection
Mulliner Nights
(1933). If offal comes into a story it is usually there for a reason. One might lazily make a character a shop assistant, a baker, an
IT
consultant . . . but if they are a butcher, or eat offal, then this is unlikely to be a neutral choice. Sarah Daniels’s play
Gut Girls
(1988), for example, is about women who worked in the slaughter-sheds of Deptford, East London, and has them deep in entrails. It recalls Charles Dickens’s account in
Oliver
Twist of
Smithfield Market, where the working conditions are ‘nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire’. The women’s work brought them relatively high wages and social freedom compared with those working in domestic service, but their bloody business confronts Victorian and perhaps even contemporary notions of the feminine.

Julie Powell’s account of mastering the art of butchery takes place in a small upstate New York butcher’s shop, where she describes herself as ‘lovingly manipulating offal with gore-begrimed fingers’.
³
For a female to train as a butcher is considered unusual even today, and Powell enjoys the experience of people listening ‘to a woman holding a butcher knife’, but her underlying motivation – to get over an extramarital affair – somewhat undercuts any sense of empowerment. It is as if the strenuous practice in learning to wield a knife effectively, cleaving, separating sinew from interconnecting tissue, or ‘seams’, and the art of scraping bones, all help her to address and readjust her emotional state. Making blood sausage mixture by spooning the mixture into a mechanical stuffer, easing the pork into the intestinal casing, she slyly describes as being ‘like the activity it often resembles . . . more fun with two people’. It might be argued that her pleasure in the task comes from this adoption of the male sexual role. When her training is complete she is given a set of knives engraved with the motto ‘Julie Powell,
Loufoque’
, French butcher’s Pig Latin for ‘crazy lady’, affectionate but confirming her gender nonconformism.

Photographer Stephani Diani juggles with the idea of gender and conventional romantic poses in her
Offal Taste
series.
⁴
She photographs people in what appear to be avant-garde outfits which are made up of offal parts: a beautiful girl wears a delicate white lace top which turns out to be tripe; a male ‘six-pack’ torso is a string of sausages; pig’s testicles are headphones; necklaces are oxtail segments or made up of pig’s hearts; a mini skirt is a row of pig’s trotters; and a graceful snood is made from plaited intestine. A woman sits pensively, seeming comforted by something that gently caresses her cheek: ox tongue, of course. This implicit humour echoes the great sixteenth-century Giuseppe Arcimboldo with his bizarre and at the time highly fashionable portraits made up entirely of fruit, flowers, or sometimes pieces of fish and meat.