Serving animal dishes with the head attached...ewww...why?

"# Are oxtails safe from Bovine spongiform encephalopathy?

Jul 17, 2019

KNOWLEDGE ARTICLE

The spinal cord, a part of the central nervous system of the beef animal affected by Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), does not extend into the tail. Oxtails are safe to cook. The United States
Department of Agriulture’s BSE information page is www.usda.gov/bse."

https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Are-oxtails-safe-from-BSE

Q. Is the U.S. food supply safe from BSE?

A. Yes. A system of strong interlocking safeguards protects human and animal health, as well as food safety, in the United States. These safeguards include the removal of specified risk materials (SRMs) – those tissues that may contain the BSE agent in an infected animal – from the human food chain.

“Inspectors from USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service also prevent non-ambulatory disabled cattle from entering the human food supply. In addition, they prevent certain slaughter practices that might present a risk of transmission of BSE. FSIS inspectors also condemn any cattle that display clinical signs of neurological disease or central nervous system disorders. To prevent the disease’s transmission to people, the single most important food safety measure is to avoid human consumption of SRMs. Inspectors in every slaughterhouse in the United States work to ensure these and other food safety standards are met.”

https://www.usda.gov/topics/animals/bse-surveillance-information-center/bse-frequently-asked-questions

What about with the tail attached? I’ve heard of “Snout to tail.” But is the tail of a whole roasted animal edible? I’m guessing it would be pretty dried out.

I’m having oxtail stew for my birthday dinner tomorrow. My gf started preparations yesterday. The oxen’s cauda equine is within the lumbar area. The coccyx I’ll be enjoying contains zero CNS tissue.

Can’t speak for other species, but oxtails have a LOT of fat on them, both around the meat and in it.

The white American discomfort with non-muscle meats is a direct legacy of slavery and white supremacy.

Pre-industrialization, it made no sense for any culture to find any cut of the animal “gross”. Animals were consumed by the local community that slaughtered them and every animal comes with the same set of brains/livers/eyeballs/blood etc. which meant that every community had their own local recipes for brains/livers/eyeballs/blood etc because everything from the animal was too precious to discard.

However, on a ~1000lb cow, you might get ~100lbs of beef chuck but maybe ~2lbs of beef eyeball and ~10lbs of beef liver. What this means is if you take an expansive view of all global cuisines over all of history, in almost all cultures, the organ meats are typically prized above muscle meats and are considered delicacies accorded to the highest status members of the group, simply because they’re much scarcer.

It wasn’t until the white genocide and settling of the Americas that land became abundant enough that the average ordinary person could expect large amounts of meat at every meal and the ability to be selective about what meat they chose to consume. For the first time, you had a vernacular cuisine in which certain parts of the animal could be thrown away or fed to the dogs or otherwise was deemed not fit for human consumption.

This, coupled with the introduction of institutionalized slavery led to a system in which the parts of the animal were split into “white meat” and “black meat”. The scientific racism of the time back derived why certain parts of the animal were white and black. Black meat was “dirty” because it touched the ground, white meat was “clean” because it was “high on the hog”. Black meat was “gnarly” because it had bones and tendons and fat, white meat was “pure” because it was large, lean muscles. It’s important to emphasize how much of this had nothing to do with the culinary value of those parts but because it served as a mechanism to uphold racial hierarchy.

The long legacy of slavery means that we still uphold many of those same values today even though they’ve been totally divorced from their original context. What’s more, the centering of Whiteness means that, even today, we view discomfort with offal as “normal” and cuisines that relish offal as “weird”, despite offalless cuisine being a tiny minority in both population and time. You see the same thing with, eg, insect eating which, despite being practiced by the majority of people worldwide, is viewed as a gross and aberrant practice by Americans because the people who eat insects tend to be poorer and darker than the people who don’t.

PS: This information was primarily sourced from Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal which I highly recommend as a great cookbook on all sorts of offal!

That may be true, but I suspect that that’s only part of the story. Plus, you say that our current preferences for muscle meat over offal are divorced from their original context. Therefore, if there was ever any racism involved, I’m not sure it’s relevant to our life today. A lot of people continue to find entrails gross to eat merely on the basis of taste/consistency, and not merely due to classist considerations.

You’re right that the same prejudices you describe today may not be relevant in other cultures. Growing up in Canada in a Serbian family, liver was regularly served in my childhood. I always thought it gross and will not eat it today. I mentioned my grandmother cooking brain for herself. In post-war Communist Jugoslavia, there were food shortages and in my mother’s family, you simply ate whatever was put on the table. As a result, both my grandmother and my mother were used to, and even liked, eating things that more privileged people would reject. I now live in the Czech Republic, where “zabijačka” or pig-killing remains popular. When a pig is killed in a village, all the giblets are processed into various “delicacies” (blood sauage, dishes reminiscent of head cheese or liverwurst, etc.). A lot of people will readily eat this, even in the city. I recall some nine years ago, I decided to take my best friend and my roommate one weekend to show them a good restaurant that I had recently discovered. That day, it so happened that their entire standard menu was in abeyance, as they had a “pig-killing feast” special. Pretty much everything on the restaurant menu that day was made of giblets. I don’t remember what I ate, but it sure wasn’t something that would count as a delicacy in my book. BTW, eating rabbit is also popular here and I have seen rabbit heads sold in the supermarket. Probably, they would go into soup; however, I’ve heard of people who then take the head, break it open, and pick out the brain…ye gods…

The only offal-based dish that I like is proper Scottish haggis. And there you have very finely chopped sheep entrails, combined with oatmeal and spice. I can also eat pate.

Regarding insects, though, I would love having a chance to try some. And escargots (French snails) are an old favorite of mine.

Back when one of the kids was into scouting and we were on a camping trip, one of the fathers set up a pit with coals and roasted a pig (with the head on) on a spit Philippian Style. He had marinated it for days, sliced the meat and added cloves of garlic and other spices. It was delicious… literally the best pork I’ve ever had.

(To finish the story though, another Dad showed up late because he had to work late. He ran a seafood delivery company and to make up for it, he brought lobsters…! Another Dad had a pot and a tripod, so we used water from a nearby stream, and started to bring it to a boil.

As the water started boiling, across that stream, five wild turkeys came out of the brush and started to drink water. I had picked up a rock when one of the other Dads tapped me on the shoulder and said,

“Hey, don’t you think we have enough food for one camping trip…?” )

Thank you for this excellent information.

I’m sure there’s some truth to this, but

  1. people have had dogs a long time, and we’ve always feed them something.
  2. i find it dubious that masters chose to give slaves what they considered the choicest parts of the animals. After all, I’m pretty sure the masters got to choose.

Personally, i think liver (properly prepared) is meat candy, and i love it. But i know a lot of people who find the flavor strong and the texture unappealing. I’m told that sweetbreads (thymus gland) are a delicacy, but i had it once and the texture was disgusting to me.

I think the offal is different, and people are less comfortable eating different foods. Whereas all the muscle meat is pretty similar, and if you learn to eat it once you can then easily enjoy all of it.

I’ve had roast grasshoppers and fresh ants. Both were delicious. Well… The grasshoppers mostly tasted like the butter they’d been cooked in.

I know several people who have tasted beetle, either on purpose or by mistake. All spat it out again, and described it as bitter and disgusting. And they were all people who enjoyed trying new foods.

I don’t mind eating head trimmings, and I don’t mind seeing the head on display, but I don’t need it on my plate to pick it apart. If there’s meat to be had, I’d like the chef to prepare it just as they prepare the rest of my dinner.

But to answer the OP? It’s just for extra fanciness. It signals being closer to the farm and closer to the factory, which is now considered virtuous and high-status.

I’ve had tacos de chapulines (grasshopper) and beondegi (Korean silk worm larvae) a couple of times. I usually give a new food a couple of chances. They were both edible—not spit-out-of-your-mouth disgusting—but I didn’t like them and probably won’t choose to try them again.

I’ve tried durian and durian-flavored things a couple of times and found that to be spit-out worthy.

This has a whiff of folk etymology about it, and I myself was unable to Google a source for it. Do you have anything on this from something besides a cookbook, maybe a history or anthropology text?

I think you’re discounting food taboos.

For example, since ancient times Judaism has ruled as off-limits quite a few parts of kosher animals, for example, all of the blood and effectively the entire hindquarters of the cow (I’m not going into the minutiae involved in this, except to say the sciatic nerve has a lot to do with it and is very difficult to remove to kosher standards. I hear that there are specialists in Israel who go through the trouble, but outside of that country Jews usually just sell the hindquarters to someone else). That’s quite a lot of a meat animal that is considered unfit for human consumption. And just one example

So it might be more accurate to say most cultures did not rule out nose-to-tail consumption, but some do, for whatever reason.

It’s also a bit simplistic in that White Americans long used “natural” sausage casing (that is, intestines) even if disdaining them as a main dish (chitterlings).

I don’t doubt that on large plantations whatever the Master’s House didn’t want was given to the slaves, from entrails to pigs’ feet to leftovers and table scraps, but if you had a member of the White household who fancied liver or kidneys or whatever it wouldn’t be passed on to the slaves. In other words, I think your statements have some validity but aren’t absolute.

^ This as well.

I can relate. When I lived in Brazil someone served chicken with the feet attached. I still ate it, but… fucking gross. I don’t like eating anything that comes from the head of an animal either (brains, tongue, cheek, etc). I’m pretty sure any aversion to such things is purely cultural though. If it’s not gross in your particular culture, then why not? What does a century have to do with it? Were they not capable of cutting heads off in the ice age?

I was wondering the same thing especially in light of the “gross” stuff rich white people eat like pâté de foie gras. And of course what’s in fashion changes from time-to-time such as lobster which used to be a poor person’s dish in the US.

Shalmanese Add me to those who would like more cites. Also, what Broomstick said regarding Jews, sciatica, and blood.

I had thought you meant “meet” in the older usage of appropriate or fitting.

I just came back from the Polish supermarket and decided to count the head cheeses at the deli case. Ten! Ten different kinds, including pheasant head cheese! (That is, presumably, not so much made with stuff from the pheasant’s head as the meat being suspended in aspic and sliceable.)

I’m just the opposite. I can’t stand liver. Just the smell of it cooking nauseates me (my mom loved liver and onions so she cooked it semi-regularly – thankfully, she didn’t force us to eat it). I love sweetbreads! They are candy to me. Yum!