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
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
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.5 Fish heads are considered a dish fit for royalty in Thailand, served with caramel sauce.6 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.7 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:
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Notes
1 USDA tracks offal exports to China, including Hong Kong, in 2001 as being 59 million worth in red meat offal; 135 million in poultry paws (which are the feet minus the spurs); and 41 million in poultry offal, these figures mounting steadily to 2011. Since 2008, China has even rivalled exports to Mexico, and in 2010 32 per cent of all US pork variety meats were exported to China. Most liver exports still go to Russia. (Global Trade Information Service, 2011).
2 Marco Polo, and Henry Yule, trans. and ed., The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and the Marvels of the East, Book 2, p. 40.
3 Gillian Kendall, Mr Ding’s Chicken Feet (Madison, WI, 2006), p. 116.
4 Fuchsia Dunlop, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China (London, 2008), p. 58.
5 Shizuo Tsuji and M.F.K. Fisher, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art (1998), p. 259.
6 Penny Van Esterik, Food Culture in Southeast Asia (London, 2008), p. 25.
7 The food writer Tom Parker-Bowles, travelling in Laos on the hunt for foods he found challenging, found that the smell of what he was eating was a significant factor.
8 Khammaan Khonkhai, trans. Gehan Wijeyewardene, The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp [1978] (Chiang Mai, 1992).
9 Maxime Rodinson et al., Medieval Arab Cookery, trans. Charles Perry (Totnes, 2001), p. 373.
10 Anissa Helou, The Fifth Quarter: An Offal Cookbook (London, 2004), p. 8; Anissa Helou, email to author (14 April 2011).
11 Nevin Halicí (1989) cited in Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford, 1999), p. 808.
12 Tess Mallos, The Complete Middle East Cookbook (London, 1995), p. 105.
13 Abdel-Moneim Said, ‘Wasting Ramadan’ in Al-Ahram, 963 (3–9 September 2009), cites government figures showing the tendency in Egypt for even the poor to overspend on food during Ramadan, by as much as 50–100 per cent of their usual food outlay.
14 Arto der Haroutunian, North African Cookery (London, 2009), p. 183.
15 Sofia Larrinúa-Craxton, The Mexican Mama’s Kitchen (London, 2005).
16 Elisabeth Luard, The Latin American Kitchen (London, 2002).
By Nina Edwards in "Offal - A Global History", Reaktion Books, London, UK, 2013, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.