About offal
The European habit of eating offal stems from the ‘waste not, want not’ culture of subsistence farming in harsh environments. The thinking went that if a household was going to slaughter a pig, cow, goat or lamb – which was by far the exception, not the norm, and something that happened once or twice a year – then every part of the animal would be eaten or otherwise used up. It was ‘nose to tail’ eating, with every part of a pig consumed except the squeal. It’s no different in Asia and Africa, except for the dietary constraints imposed by religion. Nowhere in the world did people waste food; it was too scarce and too hard to grow or raise for that. Over time, what was ‘poor’ food, eaten through force of necessity to stave off hunger and starvation, came to be part of traditional cuisine, and cherished for its own sake. The same thing happened with snails and frogs: the first people to eat them were probably desperate, and had no choice. Things were different in America. The new country, north and south, grew up on the back of a healthy cattle-herding and ranching industry over vast tracts of land. Where meat was scarce in Europe, and only for the privileged, in America it was one of the most plentiful foods and even the poor could eat it. America became the land of giant beefsteaks. Nobody needed to eat offal, and so they didn’t. It also tends to be a more squeamish culture than Europe’s, one that has given the name ‘variety meats’ to the internal organs of animals. For a while, the European immigrants to America of the 19th and 20th centuries continued to eat variety meats while cooking the dishes they knew from home, but after a while they seem to have given up.
Offal means, quite literally, ‘off-fall’ – in other words, the organs and extremities that fell to the ground when the carcass was butchered. It originally referred just to the entrails, but now covers also the internal organs, the tail, feed, head, brain and tongue. (The internal organs of birds are called giblets.) These pieces, unlike other meats, do not keep well and in the past couldn’t be preserved by salting or drying, so they were eaten at once or made into sausages or the more stylish pâté, which is basically offal that has undergone a metamorphosis into something highly desirable. Even the blood was made into sausages, with a basin set beneath the animal to catch it. Heads were cooked and eaten, or made into ‘head cheese’ – by which the head is simmered for hours in large pot, and the cooked results (brain, gristle and meat) skimmed off the skull and pressed into a gelatinous mould. This was routinely done on farms all over Europe and even some parts of America. In England, it was called brawn, and might still be if you could find it. You will still find calf’s head on many smart central European menus, and even some trendy London ones.
The British were big on offal in the past, developing many iconic dishes like steak-and-kidney pie and the traditional Scottish haggis, which is a sheep’s stomach stuffed with a boiled mixture of liver, heart and lungs with rolled oats and other ingredients. Bath chaps were pigs’ cheeks in breadcrumbs. Offal was so much a part of the diet that there were specific names for it, like ‘chitterlings’, for the intestines of a young pig, which were sometimes plaited before cooking. Tripe and onions was a standard dish. In the Midlands, faggots were a staple food – minced pig-offal mixed with bread, herbs and onions and wrapped in a pig’s caul (the inner membrane which encloses the internal organs). The phrase ‘to eat humble pie’, which means to be apologetic and submissive, comes from the baronial custom of serving up venison at a banquet and serving pie from the deer’s entrails, which were called ‘umbles’, to the least significant guests.
Offal is an excellent source of the protein we need to keep us going and growing tall and strong. In towns and cities, it was the only protein that most people could afford, and butchers’ shops carried offal as a matter of course. There were even specialised offal-butchers. In the early years of the 20th century, there were 260 tripe shops in Manchester alone. All over Europe, much inventiveness went into making these meats edible and interesting, resulting in rich additions to regional cuisines. The cuisine of Porto, Portugal’s second city and the world capital of port wine, is traditionally rooted in offal. There are lots of tripe dishes there. Offal-based dishes are also embedded in the Italian culinary repertoire.
The world king of offal today is an Englishman, Fergus Henderson of St John restaurant, situated with historical significance hard by London’s former wholesale meat market, Smithfield.
It’s rated as one of the best restaurants in the world. After training as an architect, Henderson taught himself to cook, opened his restaurant, wrote books and generally dedicated himself to bringing the message of offal to the masses. “We don’t seek out the goriest things. We cook what we do because it’s delicious,” Henderson told the BBC, “The gastronomic possibilities of an animal are so huge once you start to look beyond the fillet.” He may not have reached the masses, but he has certainly influenced other chefs in Europe and North America, who have become noticeably more creative with offal. It wasn’t a coincidence that Sue Townsend had her most celebrated creation, Adrian Mole, become an offal chef, in one of her world-best-selling ‘diaries’.
There are several reasons for the decline in the consumption of offal, at least in the home. One is that lots of people have it ingrained in their thinking that this is poor people’s food, to be discarded as soon as you can afford something better, or even to prove to yourself and the neighbours that you’re not an offal-eater or poor person. Another is that we are now a whole lot more squeamish than our forebears, who didn’t buy their chickens plucked and trimmed and neatly packed into frozen bags, or their meat in careful slices. A trip to the butcher’s was a far more visceral experience for our grandmothers than it is for us – and in any case, most people don’t go to the butcher any more, preferring to get their meat packed at the supermarket, if at all. I have to say, though, that the squeamishness is entirely understandable when it comes to testicles – perhaps you just have to divorce the thought from the deed.
Without a butcher to advise us on what to buy and how to prepare it, we’re lost, especially now that the transmission of this essential information down the generations has been broken. So people buy what they know: steak for the grill. Another problem could be that many of us were put off liver for life by being forced to eat it as children, usually during school lunches. My own memories of liver are of a tough, shrivelled mass cooked to extinction and with no flavouring whatsoever, which I was obliged to eat in primary school while the monitor glared threateningly at me and the bite-sized pieces grew to elephantine size in my cheeks. I’m pretty sure that this is a fairly common childhood experience for my contemporaries. There are no school dinners any more, and parents appear to have stopped serving up liver, perhaps because, like me, they were completely put off by their own foul experiences, even though liver is super-rich in iron and vitamin B complex. My childhood experience of kidneys is completely different. My grandfather made an excellent steak-and-kidney pie, and I loved it. Taste and texture are what shape our early attitudes towards offal. They can mark us for life with horror, or they can make us more open-minded about what we eat.