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22
Originally a medieval feast, the celebration of Þorrablót had waned, and was revived in the late 1950s by a Reykjavík restaurant specializing in traditional food.

23
See
http://vimeo.com
5 590685 for a scene in the film adaptation of Arnaldur Indrðason’s
Jar City
(Baltasar Kormákur, 2006), in which Inspector Erlander sits quietly at his kitchen table eating half a pickled sheep’s head.

24
Gestgjafinn
, ‘Feast Days and Food Days’, at
www.gestgjafinn.is/english/nr/352
.

25
Sharon Hudgins,
The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East
(College Station,
TX
, 2003), p. 138.

26
Thomas Keller,
The French Laundry Cookbook
(London, 1999).

4 Macho Status

1
Charlotte Du Cann in
Offal and the New Brutalism
(London, 1985) examines the boisterous British macho culture of the 1980s.

2
Barbara
Pym, Jane and Prudence
(London, 1953), p. 21. The idea that men require meat is a recurring conceit in Pym’s novels.

3
Julie Powell,
Cleaving
(New York, 2009), p. 64, in a recipe for blood sausage.

4
Stephanie Diani,
Offal Taste
photo series at
www.eatmedaily.com
, April 2009.

5
Dale Kramer, in ‘Hardy and Readers:
Jude the Obscure’
, in
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy
(Cambridge, 1999), ed. Kramer, describes the censorship that Hardy faced when publishing the novel in serial form in
Harper’s Magazine
in 1895, where he had ‘drastically diminished the pig-killing scene, evidently because American readers had recently been offended by reports of cruelty to animals on Western ranches’, pp. 166–7. This might be seen as evidence of late nineteenth-century sensibility towards the brute facts of slaughter and towards offal in particular.

6
Diane Cardwell, ‘A Dining Club for Those With Adventurous Stomachs’,
New York Times
, 8 July 2010.

7
Giles Coren, ‘Cay Tre: Chicken Gizzard and Muop is a Hell of a Name, but English People Don’t Like Eating Gizzards’,
The Times
, 29 September 2007.

8
Clarissa Dickson Wright,
The Haggis: A Short History
(Belfast, 1998).

9
‘The Horace Poem’, in
Monty Python’s Big Red Book
(London, 1980).

10
James Meikle, ‘Hands Off Our Haggis, Say Scots After English Claim’,
Guardian
, 3 August 2009.

11
Alexander McCall Smith, ‘Keep Your Hands Off Our Haggis’,
New York Times
, 6 August 2009.

5 As Ritual

1
Andrew Dalby,
Food in the Ancient World from
A–Z
(London, 2003), p. 288. Dalby relates how having to cook and eat the meat directly after slaughter and sacrifice was not ideal from the gourmet perspective, and that Plutarch suggests hanging the meat in a fig tree before cooking to solve the culinary problem.

2
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2008.

3
Ed Vulliamy, ‘Srebrenića: Genocide and Memory’,
Open Democracy
, 9 June 2012.

4
Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked
(London, 1986), pp. 241—4.

5
James Bradley,
Flyboys
(New York, 2007), pp. 519–20.

6
According to Alan Davidson,
The Oxford Companion to Food
(Oxford, 1999), p. 83, blood-tapping is a traditional custom for nomadic tribes such as Berbers and Monguls because it was an available renewable resource. The Masai obtain blood by firing an arrow at close range into a vein in the neck of their cattle, and the wound is then plugged; Martin Jones in
A History of the World in 100 Objects
, presented by Neil MacGregor of the British Museum, on
BBC
Radio 4, January 2010.

7
Malcolm Margolin, ‘The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco Bay Area,’ cited in Sage Dilts, ‘Eating Offal’,
Edible East Bay
(Spring 2011).

8
Inga Clendinnen in
Aztecs: An Interpretation
(Cambridge, 1991) cites the Christian missionary W. H. Prescott, who wrote in the early 1840s of his distaste, not for the killings themselves, but for the inappropriate nature of the subsequent feast, for its not being ‘the coarse repast of famished cannibals . . . Surely, never was refinement and the extreme of barbarism brought so closely into contact with each other.’ Clendinnen throws doubt on his interpretation.

9
Unani
or
unani-tibbi literally
translates as ‘Greek medicine’. It is built on the teaching of Hippocrates and Galen and was further developed in the Islamic world.

10
Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary
(London, 1911).

11
John Platt, ‘South African Gamblers Smoke Endangered Vulture Brains for Luck’,
Scientific American
, 10 June 2010.

12
Norman Lewis,
Naples ’44
(London, 1978).

6 As Medicine

1
Mark Grant,
Galen on Food and Diet
(London, 2000), p. 160–62.

2
Vivienne Lo, ‘Pleasure, Prohibition and Pain: Food and Medicine in Traditional China’, in
Tripod and Palate
, ed. Roel Sterckx (New York, 2005), p. 174, cites Hu Sihui’s
Propriety
and Essentials in Eating and Drinking
, completed in 13 30.

3
John Cooper,
Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food
(Lanham,
MD
, 1993). By ‘eating different portions of an animal, the corresponding part of the human body would be strengthened, but an exception was made for the heart, brain and liver’, p. 127.

4
Li Shizhen’s
Bencao Gangmu was
finished in 1578 and provides the most extensive pharmaceutical record of Chinese medicine, including recipes and illustrations, and advice about where to find the best quality animals for different purposes and the uses and medical effects of their offal parts..

5
‘Why Eat a Placenta?’,
BBC
News Magazine
, 18 April 2006.

6
International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods, ed.,
Microbial Ecology of Food Commodities
(New York, 2005).

7
Roger Kelsey, Chief Executive of the
NFMFT
, email to the author, 3 March 2011.

8
Anil Aggrawal, ‘Death By Vitamin A’, in
The Poison Sleuths
, October 1999.

9
Norimitsu Onishi, ‘If the Fish Liver Can’t Kill, Is it Really a Delicacy?’,
New York Times
, 4 May 2008.

10
Tamao Noguchi, marine toxin specialist from Tokyo Healthcare University, cited ibid.

7 Leftovers

1
J.C.H. King, Birgit Pautsztat and Robert Storrie,
Arctic Clothing
(Montreal, 2005).

2
Mary-Anne Wensley’s
Inescapable Shelter
of 2009 is a shed-sized structure rather like a translucent beehive, for which she needed 2,700 pig intestine bricks.

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BOOK: Offal: A Global History
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