There’s a phrase that has stuck in my mind. Stephen Fry was, I think, quoting Jame Joyce’s Ulysses when he said something about the “faint tang of urine” that is essential in properly prepared kidneys.
I think that did it for me for life.
Needs Garlic.
I’d probably enjoy offal if it were prepared by Chris Cosentino. Well, enjoy might be the wrong term, but at least I’d be willing to try it.
I don’t think it’s necessarily any worse than, say the overpowering aroma of socks, vomit, BO or garbage that emanates from some of the very best cheeses.
Steak and kidney pie is possibly the best thing in the whole world. (I say ‘possibly’, because it might actually be steak and kidney pudding that’s best).
The classic example is lobster.
Why should we take your word on what’s edible? 
Even worse perhaps are andouillette which smell, frankly, of shit. Doesn’t stop them being delicious though.
Personally I’m happy for offal to maintain its unpopularity, keeping it cheap. I would happily never touch bland chicken breast, or samey beef steak or pork loin in return for cheap and plentiful kidneys, liver, black puddings et al.
By the way, the answer is pudding. Definitely pudding.
That’s the reason I stopped eating at White Castle.
In a word, YES. What you term “offal” is generally much higher in cholesterol, fat, and purines than muscle meat. This is especially probelmatic for us older folk. I love the stuff but cann no longer eat any of it according to my doctor. Hell, if I simply look at a plate of sweetbreads (YUM!) I have a flare-up of gout!
Generally, this is called “trolling”. :rolleyes:
Actually, on thinking about it, I agree. It’s become fashionable lately for the celebrity TV chefs to start showcasing how good some cheap ingredients are - and it makes me grind my teeth. When I see Jamie Oliver telling everyone how to make Turkey drumsticks come out as tender and delicious as pulled pork (a trick I already discovered), I know that the price of that specific thing is about to go up, and never come back down.
Yeah… maybe, but a steak and kidney pie can be eaten on the move (well, if you have a spare shirt)
I hope this thread someday becomes a zombie thread so we can prove that zombies are not racist because they eat brains.
In an attempt to actually seriously engage with the OP, I’ll dispense with the use of the word racist since it carries so many different overtones as to render the conversation unhelpful. But I do think there is a degree of othering that is associated with offal which can be problematic.
If you look at, for example, British colonialist attitudes towards Indians, food can be used as a tool for alienation and disassociation. The Indians eat all of this “weird stuff” that “isn’t even food”, which makes them, subtly, not quite human, as contrasted with “proper British food”.
Attitudes similar to these persisted until around the 60’s or so but modern food culture, for the most part, has encouraged a pluralistic view of food cultures and an understanding that a good rib roast of beef, a properly cooked neapolitan pizza and a good bowl of lamb vindaloo and can be equal expressions of cuisine. Among all but a few pockets of this country, there’s an understanding that British, Italian and Indian cuisines are all legitimate expressions of a view towards food. And while it’s ok for you to say that you don’t like lamb vindaloo, it’s considered socially inappropriate and ignorant to express disbelief that anyone could like lamb vindaloo.
While such shifts have been made with many cuisines, offal and unusual animal eating still represents a sticking point. Within society and even in this thread, you see expressions of factually untrue beliefs such as:
- Offal is only eaten out of desperation by the poor because it’s cheaper than meat
- Offal represents some kind of machismo dare style eating and the people eating it couldn’t possibly enjoy themselves.
- Offal eaters are crazy and a touch of insanity is required to find offal palatable.
- If only offal eaters could taste the food non-offal eaters are eating, they would immediately be converted to this better tasting food.
The problem is not so much that these views are held by some people so much as that it’s still deemed socially acceptable to hold these views.
A good way of illustrating this is through the lens of fear factor style dare shows that use legitimate dishes of foreign cuisines such as balut or roasted crickets as dares for Western contestants. Imagine if you will, there existed a Chinese show broadcast during primetime, during which contestants were faced with an array of expensive bries, blue cheeses and ripe soft cheeses which they were “challenged” to eat and the contestants then proceeded to act clownishly and overly exaggerate puking and disgust. Could you not see how at least some people in the west would find that insensitive and grossly offensive?
Also imagine that, for a western fear factor show, instead of having to eat balut, the contestants had to chow down on pieces of tandoori chicken and the same exaggerated facial expressions and dramatic gagging took place. It would be all but guaranteed that there would be immediate outrage and a media firestorm. But because we view balut as in a different category than tandoori chicken because it is offal, we fail to make this equivalence.
So while I’m avoiding using the word racist in this discussion, yes, I do think when viewed through this lens, the Western attitudes towards offal can be highly problematic and be used as an instrument towards the othering of another culture. And I think the glib way it’s been treated in this thread does not befit what I feel like is a legitimate question.
… Bozo the Clown ?
Oh, teach your grandma to suck eggs. Or do you figure the subject of offal is a hot button topic ? If so, you’re Bozo the Clown.
Quoth Herriot,
Blech. I tried that once at an “English” pub here in Florida. The steak was all right, but the kidneys were like liver-to-the-tenth-power, I was still tasting it the next day and not in a good way.
In Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, Jack Shaftoe and his Cabal are temporarily stranded in India. One of them, an Englishman, helps raise money for the band by performing a shocking, horrifying public novelty act: Eating a raw kidney! (Attention is called to the urine that dribbles out when he prods it with his fork.)
One of my local grocery stores sells chitterlings in up to 5 gallon buckets. What was that about Americans not eating offal? Also tripe, brains, tongue, liver…
Of course it’s not middle to upper class white folks dominating the market for all this, but we’ve enough other sorts of folks around here to make them common foods. But yeah, some of it seems awful pricey for “poor folk food”.
What’s the big deal? Hotdogs, Vienna sausage, other types of “mystery meat”-people eat this dreck all the time.
And what about haggis? Its a delicacy in Scotland.
It is indeed a quote from Ulysses, and a very noticeable one because it’s the opening lines of the second and longest of the three sections the book is divided into.
“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.”