Offal: A Global History (3 page)

There exists a lexicon of words and phrases that appear to draw on our associations with offal, and suggest in turn how we have come to think of it. You may consider this to be a load of tripe, with not enough gristle, a bloody mess, brainless. Even archaic expressions can affect current attitudes. Blister my kidneys! I must keep my head, trust to my palate, be true to my heart’s core, whether or not we are of the same kidney. Consider the extraneous offal parts and all their everyday comparative uses, which make eating their animal parities seem disturbingly intimate: keep your nose/snout out of it, keep your eyeballs peeled, your tail between your legs, your skin on, your ears flapping, heart’s blood, in the recesses of your visceral maw, yet hold your tongue, for I never intended to seem tongue in cheek.

Given the backdrop of our relationship to offal and its associated vocabulary, any desire to imagine our own insides as a neat arrangement of organs and tubes like a child’s model or a biology diagram at school, or just the wish to avoid thinking of ourselves as entrails encased in muscle and skin, is disrupted by our encounter with this foodstuff. We have a very limited idea of what lies inside our bodies. Jonathan Miller describes how what we think we know is often pastiche: ‘We reconstruct our insides from pictures in advertisements for patent medicines, from half-remembered school science, from pieces of offal on butcher’s slabs and all sorts of medical folklore.’
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The resulting confusion may account in part for the curious impression that offal can make. In Edinburgh, chocolatier Nadia Ellingham sells haggis-flavoured chocolate: one suspects that it is popular not only for the blend of spices used, but also because the idea of meaty innards and chocolate creates a sense of pleasing disjuncture (though
the chocolates contain no actual offal meat). The punning
Glasgow Herald
headline is revealing: ‘Haggis Chocolate Does Not Taste Offal.’

Often people claim distaste for offal without having eaten it. Fermented fish offal, for example, is sometimes criticized because it smells and tastes of cat urine, and yet it is unlikely that many would ever have knowingly tasted the latter. For some the notion of fish innards is unappealing. It seems to be something other than the taste or smell that is off-putting. We tend to fear unexpected sensation. One might claim to like or dislike puréed celery, yet this has none of the force of an aversion to offal, and it might seem odd to feel contempt for someone who likes it or shame for liking it oneself. This reluctance to eat offal in particular is sometimes betrayed by the sort of apologies made by enthusiasts. Mary Douglas comments that ‘the palate is trained [and] that taste and smell are subject to cultural control’.
⁸
While there is a complex range of reactions to foods we find difficult, there does seem to be a difference between disliking animal as opposed to vegetable matter.

Umami
(the word means ‘delicious taste’ in Japanese), the fifth quality of taste besides bitter, salty, sour and sweet, is a complex savoury flavour that is significant in offal as well as being found in green tea, truffles, tomatoes, asparagus and some cheeses. Chinese cookery has long used a form of
umami
, or
wei jing
, otherwise known as
MSG
or monosodium glutamate. It is found in soy sauce and fermented fish sauce, and is a recognized flavour in Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and much of the Far East. Containing proteins and amino acids, it is high in the glutamates we first taste in mother’s milk, creating a pleasing sensation in the mouth and making food seem more satisfying.

Offal also has other qualities that are familiar to us from other foods: saltiness, fattiness or a rich mouth-coating
creaminess, as in brain and sweetbreads, and a metallic quality, as in blood or urine in kidneys. Such taste impressions may compete with one another, so that we notice the slightly acrid taste of ox liver, set off by the odour of its cooking, and find ourselves immune to – or perhaps drawn to – its savoury allure. In recent years the tasty threesome of sugar, salt and fat in Western diet has tended to dominate our food, rather than more subtle spice flavours, and this blunting of our facility to distinguish other tastes might be extended to the subtleties of offal
umami
.

Sometimes a dislike of eating offal is put down to its lack of definable form, even though the outer flesh of an animal, once eviscerated, is no more discrete. Spam, despite its joke acronyms such as ‘spare parts animal meat’, is still widely consumed by many who profess never to eat offal. The same might be said of some sausages and other processed meat products. In
yakitori
bars throughout modern Japan you will find skewers of distinctively flavoured chicken meat that are in fact parson’s nose, that fleshy protuberance at the mouth of the anus that contains the fatty uropygial gland. If a foreigner questions the restaurant, she may be assured they are no such thing, the staff forearmed against a Westerner’s distaste.

Perhaps it is the relation between offal and its living functions, its relation to blood, urine and faecal matter, that disturbs us. When we are short of breath our lungs make a ragged sound, so Elizabeth David’s recollection of ‘the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheep’s lungs frying in oil’, or rattling through the valves of tripe, may seem too human to provoke our appetites.
⁹
Kidneys may disturb because their main function is to filter impurities and drain waste into the bladder. I am a thing, like all animals, whose mouth – with which I might speak, eat, kiss or sing arias of great beauty – is, in due course, connected to an anus.

Offal mainly comes from within the animal, suggesting a parallel with what we think of as our inner selves. My offal is my vitals, essential to life. My innermost being is the intimate marrow of what it is to think and feel, and thus it is sometimes troubling to think of eating entrails, guts, sexual parts or facial features.

Elaborate cleansing rites suggest that we may consider offal dirtier than other meat. On the one hand, waste matter needs to be removed, and on the other this requirement has become ritualized. Mrs Beeton goes to some lengths to stress the importance of hot blanching and further soakings in several changes of water in the preparation of various offal dishes. Weltering, or steeping, is intended to release flavour and remove impurities; blanching may whiten the food, neutralize any bacteria or enzymes present and delay the process of decay. Offal may also be soaked in milk, as if to take on its essential nurturing quality. The water used to clean the offal may be salted. In Japan this links to a traditional belief that elemental sea water is a purifying force.

The American and British obsession with the bowels might account for anxieties about eating animal guts. However, Jonathan Miller mentions that though the French are obsessed with their livers, there is little evidence that this inhibits their appetite for foie gras.
¹⁰

We have become distanced from the processes of butchery and slaughterhouse in the West since the gradual movement from rural to urban living in the nineteenth century. Today meat is often packaged into neat portions that no longer remind us of its origins. Offal cannot always be so easily disguised. A frilly piece of sheep’s tripe or a pair of pig’s ears are all too redolent of their former role.

Cooks and gourmets promote offal in terms of its flavour and value for money. In the same breath they speak of prime cuts as being first-class meats, implying that offal is not of this rank. Yet when Fergus Henderson describes deep-fried lamb’s brains as ‘like biting through crunch into a rich cloud’ he not only evokes the paradoxical changes in texture from crisp to suddenly delicate and insubstantial, but appeals to some transcendental quality of the taste experience.
¹¹

Brilliantly dyed pickled ox tail, Brixton Market, South London.

Most of the world has never had a problem with offal. On the contrary, it is at the meaty core of many cultures’ gastronomy. In China’s age-old regional cuisine, offal allows even the poorest to elevate a meal from eating to live to something more choice. Pork blood soup and offal dumplings,
or jiaozi
, were eaten by night labourers in Kaifeng over 1,000 years ago. Offal-enriched dumplings have long been eaten in both Russia and Turkey. Today the largest market of the United States, a major exporter of offal, is China, for their pork feet, tongue and heart.
¹
Offal is food for all, adding flavour and texture to the scantiest diet. In the late thirteenth century Marco Polo observed poor people in the province of Carajan in Mongolia eating raw liver straight from the carcass: they ‘cut it small, and put it in a sauce of garlic and spices, and so eat it’.
²

The
Li-Chi
or
Book of Rites
lists liver as a great delicacy, suitable sustenance for the elderly, and suggests a relation between the freshness of food and good health. Offal, which must be eaten fresh, if not raw, is therefore recommended as a healthy food.

Offal is basic food on the streets of China and at the same time harks back to imperial court cuisine. Pork offal
predominates. Intestines and uterus are particularly valued, but the offal of chicken, geese, duck and cattle is also enjoyed. This ancient fast food can be marinated and then cooked in moments. Dishes using pork include liver slices fried with onions or floating in clear broth; pork braised in sweetened soy, or
wu xiang
, served cold; and deep fried pork intestine,
zha fei chang
, dipped in fermented
tian mian jiang
Sichuan sauce.
Lo mei
are little offal snacks that have become something of a fashion in New York restaurants of late. All parts of the poultry are used, including the feet and the tongue as well as hearts and livers. Several ducks’ tongues are served on a plate, usually fried. A feast of duck’s head, halved and served with tongue alongside it, is a delicacy dating back 600 years to the Ming Dynasty. Chicken’s feet are a popular snack. An American English-language teacher on a boat journey from Shanghai to Texas with a group of Chinese tried to acclimatize herself to this food: ‘Each foot had long, skinny toes, and each toe had a tiny, oval nail on the end. The joints, where the skin wrinkled, looked like human knuckles.’
³

Chicken’s feet, deep-fried, stewed or barbecued, are a great delicacy in many cultures where the texture of skin and tendon are appreciated.

Offal dishes vary by region in China, both in preparation methods and in what is available. Shandong excels in seafood offal and tripe dishes, whereas Cantonese cooking places more of an emphasis on pork and beef, and traditionally dog and snake offal. Sichuan cuisine is spicy, seasoned with chilli, cayenne, Sichuan pepper and ginger. A typically hot, spiced stew of pork kidneys,
wu gen chang wang
, contains blood cakes and tofu, and is said to keep out the cold. Blood tofu, or
pin yin
, is made from duck’s blood and served with sticky rice. Pork tongue sliced in sesame oil is another typical Sichuan dish in the melee of delicate or robust, hot and spicy or subtly distinct additions to a diet based on rice and noodles. Yet though offal sometimes plays the role of a luxury food in China, Fuchsia Dunlop reflects that
chao ji za
, for example, is a stir-fried dish of chicken parts that would be thrown away by most European cooks.
⁴

A Chinese stall crammed with dried offal including dried pig’s snout and larynx.

Salmon fish heads with their delicate scarlet gills are used to make soup in Japan, flavoured with ginger and
kombu
seaweed. The cheeks are especially prized for their meaty texture and intense flavour.

For the inexperienced Westerner, the most off-putting aspect of offal as it is prepared in the East can be its challenging texture. For example, the ancient custom of serving the head of a fish to an honoured guest relies on its being newly killed to keep tender the delicate flesh of the jowls and eyes.
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Fish heads are considered a dish fit for royalty in Thailand, served with caramel sauce.
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Pork kidneys are recognized as being nourishing and the suet fat that surrounds them is considered healthy and easily digestible. For the Chinese pal ate the unusual texture is something to be savoured, setting it apart from the bland food of the West. Crispiness and
a certain chewiness might be acceptable but the taste for gristle and things that slip and gloop in the mouth can be hard to acquire.

In South Korea sliced cows’ feet are used for a spicy soup that might once have been made with indigenous buffalo. It is customary to serve guests a drink accompanied by small snacks, and these are traditionally offal, including chicken’s feet and pig skin, ears and kidneys, usually presented on short wooden skewers. Texture is often considered more important than taste.
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A popular dish consists of pork intestines stuffed with spiced noodles. It is kept soft, just holding together, for the experience of its sudden disintegration in the mouth.

In northeastern Thailand and Laos a raw – or almost raw – minced meat dish called
lu
(larb or larp) is dressed with entrails and the enzyme-rich stomach contents of the animal, which is usually deer. Sometimes the effect can be surprising to the uninitiated:

Larb lu
, minced raw beef with blood, bile and spices on a Chiang Mai market stall.

Pho soup stall in a Hanoi street market. The broth is made from beef bone and oxtail, sometimes chicken, with slices of meat such as tripe and flavoured with a wide range of spices and herbs including charred ginger, cardamom, fennel, cinnamon, star anise, lime, chillies and fermented fish sauce.

‘It’s very nice, but it’s bitter,’ the young man observed, not knowing that the more bitter the larp the better.

‘Of course it’s bitter. It’s delicious. I especially asked for the
di
.’
Di
was the green liquid which comes from a little sac adjacent to the liver.
⁸

Soup can be a way of eking out small quantities of offal to to add flavour to a starch-based diet, such as in pig’s organ soup, a traditional street food in Singapore. The past French colonial presence in Vietnam has led to fresh baguette sandwiches, or
banh mi
, stuffed with offal, fresh herbs, ginger and star anise, sometimes with pickled carrot and daikon. Rice porridge with pig offal,
cháo lòng
, and deep-fried pig intestines are popular street food.

The Japanese, historically a people that have relied on the sea for their survival, favour seafood offal, considering
it particularly healthy. Among
chimni
, or ‘rare taste’ foods, are
ankimo
(monkfish liver),
mefun
(pickled liver and other internal organs of a male salmon) and
shiokara
(finely chopped sea food in a brown sauce made from its pulverized and fermented viscera).
Shiokara
is a popular snack; bars specializing in this delicacy might offer squid, oyster, shrimp or sea urchin varieties, often accompanied by whisky. Pickled sea cucumber innards,
konowata
, are prized for their slippery texture, and are known as
trepang
in Indonesia and
balatan
in the Philippines.

Offal from mammals, and in particular large animals, was considered unclean in Shinto terms, though today Japanese
yakitori
bars include beef as well as chicken offal. Cow’s tongue is considered a delicacy. A mixed dish of offal is known in Kansai dialect as
horum onyaki
, or discarded goods, and thought to be particularly healthy. Beef or pork offal hotpot,
motsu nabe
, served with
ramen
, broth and noodles, can include larynx, spleen, birth canal, tongue, uterus, rectum, diaphragm and various bits of cartilage. If grilled on bamboo skewers over charcoal, the offal is served with a fiery mustard.
Motsu nabe
is best known for containing beef intestines and became less popular after the worldwide
BSE
outbreak, though a minority continue to seek it out, partly to defy such danger. A desire to shock often influences opulent Japanese cuisine, leading to dishes such as frog heart, still beating, as an expensive and esoteric sushi morsel.