You can’t get real haggis in the USA because it’s illegal on a technicality, but you can get almost-haggis from a few specialized shops. Kearny, NJ, and Long Beach, CA, are the best places to look; there aren’t very many British ghettos in the US.
Yep, with thin strips of meat that (like Pho) can include tendon, tripe, heart, etc., and in some fancy versions bring the raw meat to the table to dip in hot broth and flash cook before eating (sorry, should have specified it was a “fancy” version of shabu shabu).
That fact that organ meats are generally referred to as ‘offal’ may have something to do with it, as well. Spoken aloud, it is an unmistakable homophone to another word that has definite negative connotations. Humans tend to eat what they hear. If it sounds good, eat it. Perhaps it’s just an American thing, as most other cultures, including our closest linguistic relatives, the Brits, have little problem with organ meats. Steak and kidney pie, anyone?
Haggis: hubby and I had haggis with neeps (turnips) and tatties (potatoes) in a pub in Edinburgh and were very pleasantly surprised at how good and flavorful it was. Of course we both like liver, head cheese, blood sausage, tripe Madrid-Style Tripe Recipe (Callos Madrilenos) and Filipino dinuguan Dinuguan - Wikipedia which features pork blood, intestines, lungs and other offal.
One of the most memorable literary descriptions of offal appears in James Joyce’s Ulysses; one of the protagonists, Leopold Bloom is a big fan and is introduced as such:
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
He’s described as heading out to the butcher’s for a fresh kidney for breakfast, pondering on his choice:
“Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley’s. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz’s.”
He goes to the butcher for the kidney, looking at it as it “oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last”, anxious that the “nextdoor girl at the counter” might buy it too, but does get it (it costs three pennies) and when wrapped in paper, “His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.”
When he gets home he fries the kidney in “sizzling butter sauce”, and enjoys it, “chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat.”
As a reasonably well educated American I still had no idea that ‘offal’ meant animal organs. I thought it meant animal, well, urine…
Well, that would be awful.
My mother used to make what would be considered chicken-liver pate. Not sure what it’s official Yiddish name was. She is gone now, but I can still smell the making of it: sauté chicken livers in oil until well cooked, then sauté onions in the hot chicken liver fat until carmelized, add cooked livers and onions to blender (plus the dark scraping goodness from the hot pan), then add a couple hard-boiled eggs and mayo, blend into paste. Spread on matzo or other crackers.
My wife witnessed this process probably once during our early days (and still decided to marry me), so whenever I see chicken livers at the market I reminisce, but she quickly shuts that down with “no F-ing way in my house and my kitchen!”. So that is why I don’t eat offal meat any longer.
bolding mine
Unlaid eggs? What? So they’re still inside the chicken?
Yes - when you eviscerate a chicken, the oviduct is quite fascinating - it can be a literal production line of eggs - starting with some that are nothing much more than smallish yolks, through to others that have a partly-formed shell - all lined up ready to come out.
snowthx, I don’t know the Yiddish name, but do you mean “chopped liver”? As in “What am I. chopped liver?”
I love haggis. People eat sausage, nothing wrong with haggis.
Something we find here in Oz is that things like sweatmeats are very hard to find, because the demand is very high from those countries and local communities that do value them. So they are actually a useful export item or directed to specialist butchers. Similarly many other offal items are easy to find if you find a butcher from a community that has a heritage in eating said item.
Depends on life circumstance. The old folks that were poor ate a lot of liver from both beef and chicken. Pop used to mix hog’s brains and scrambled eggs, but he came from farmers. Ma came from Greeks, they used to slaughter a lot of lamb and so had liver from that and lamb shanks and they’d boil the head for “head cheese”, the gelatin from that is prized in some circles. Shanks used to be a true garbage cut, but I see them in restaurants for $20.00 plopped onto pasta. If they can call it ethnic, they find a way. Here, we have lots of Portuguese and Hispanics and so we have chicken paws, the feet of chicken, which they BBQ up nice and crispy and which I buy for broth. Most people I know won’t touch liver, however. Something about their notions that filter meats are gross. To each, their own.
My father was a Jewish kid from The Bronx and my mom was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. After my father graduated law school, he was drafted and both my parents – two people who had never been south of Atlantic City – found themselves almost as far South as you can get in Hinesville Georgia.
When they first moved to Hinesville, my parents rented a room in a boarding house with shared bathroom facilities from an old Jewish lady, I believe my mom said was Mrs. Goldberg. One day, my mom walked into the bathroom and spied something in the tub. She immediately got Mrs. Goldburg and showed her. “What is that?”, my mom asked.
“Oy vey”, Mrs. Goldburg replied, “They’re pickling pigs feet in the tub again.”
Even when I was a child, pickled pigs’ feet were still ordinary objects of discourse, though my family never served them.
I had to resurrect this thread just to say that “seasoned grab bags of animal miscellany” is a brilliant turn of phrase that I wish I’d written.
For some reason I thought it was the inedible parts of the innards.
This must account for all that canned mystery meat sold in WWII. ‘Serves your whole family for pennies per serving’, bulked out with radishes, olives, and so on, and things from your victory garden.