Where does the liver sit? Is it not an organ?
The OED (my old one) says, “The parts which are cut off in dressing the carcase of an animal killed for food; in earlier use applied mainly to the entrails; now, as a trade term, including the head and tail, as well as the kidneys, heart, tongue, liver, and other parts.” So it clearly depends on what one is willing to waste. The earliest quote in this sense is:
Take þo offal and þo lyver of þo swan,
In gode brothe þou sethe hom þan;
When hit is sothyne, take oute þe bonus,
Smalle hew þo flesshe, Syr, for þe nonus;
So that cook explicitly considered swan liver not offal.
It’s always been my understanding that “tripe” is stomach lining.
Intestines would be “chitterlings,” in many cases specifically pork intestines, but I’ve heard the term also used for the intestines of cattle and other animals.
Sits below the diaphragmme, in the abdomen. It’s guts.
Liver is, but onion isn’t.
Offal are the non-muscle-meat edible parts of an animal. I suppose some tails would be considered offal but oxtails do have some meat and you don’t eat the bones. I haven’t heard of blood or marrow being considered offal but they would fit the description. Dishes made with offal aren’t offal (though often awful), but you are eating offal when you eat them.
Huh. I guess I’ve always had the wrong definition of offal. I thought it was just the parts that are most often discarded. So I didn’t even consider liver to count.
So to you, offal can only be an ingredient, but not a cooked dish, is that right?
I’ve done dozens of medieval feasts. I go by what they called offal, the entrails and internal organs of an animal.
Sausage casings don’t count.
The only thing on your list that qualifies is the liver.
The things those medieval folks ate though.
Umble Pie
Entrails of a deer (stomach, washed intestine, liver, stomach, kidneys, etc)
beef suet to the same weight as the deer entrails
10 cloves
tsp mace
tsp nutmeg
tsp cinammon
pinch salt
4 pounds of currants
half a pound of candy’d orange,lemon and citron peel
half a pound of dates
pastry
Well, yes. Similarly if you pointed to a hamburger and asked “is that meat?” I’d answer “well, it contains meat.” The whole thing isn’t meat, just one of the ingredients.
Seems like needless pedantry to me. I’d answer “yes” because it’s obvious that the person asking must mean it in a “or is it vegetarian” kind of thing.
Is a roast leg of lamb “meat”? I mean, it *contains *salt and pepper and garlic and herbs…but you’d be hard-put to find someone who’d say “no”.
If you are In the binary universe of offal and meat then liver&onions is offal, just like in the binary world of vegetables and meat a hamburger (with bun) is meat. In any other context liver&onions is not offal, it contains offal.
The context seemed pretty clear from the OP, it contained lots of processed items, so we’re clearly already into the “contains” territory. And a binary one.
Further backed up by the subsequent clarification:
Given the choices, it seems obvious to me the line is that between “offal foods and non-offal foods”, not “pure offal ingredients vs all other dishes, some of which may contain offal but are not, for some reason, considered offal”. Liver-and-onions is mainly liver, with some onions. Liver is the primary ingredient by far. (at least, the way I’ve had it)
TL;DR: If someone says “Hey, want to try some offal”, I’d not be surprised to get an offal dish, not a piece of raw kidney. Apparently, some people would.
There’s no line, it’s either offal or not. The list contains offal, non-offal, and mixes of the two. That’s no indication of a binary choice.
If ever a thread needed a soundtrack!
My wife and I have been enjoying watching the occasional old French Chef episode. Yesterday’s was tripe! My god! Not just offal, but offal cooked with offal and capped off w/ more offal! She displayed the complete stomach lining from all 4 stomachs, but only cooked one part of it. Cooked it with pigs feet (a cow’s foot would be better, but hard to find!) Then capped it off with a healthy layer of suet.
Okay, I’ll grant the possibility that it MIGHT taste OK, but having seen that show, I’d be damned if I could try it and keep it down! 
To you.
To me, it consists of dishes that are offal, and ones that aren’t, and the OP later indicated that there was, indeed, a line they had in mind.
And figuring out why I put something that very definitely contained an offal ingredient on the non-offal side was what made it a very interesting question.
My cousin is a chef* who’s very into offal, and nose-to-tail cooking, in and amongst all his hipster locavore shit. He makes all of it taste like heaven. It’s all in what you do with it.
*a very good one. One of the top 10 chefs in South Africa, I’d say.
This is correct.
I’ll take your word for it.
Yeah - probably the type of thing where I’d prefer not knowing what it was. Like they say about sausage and politics…
I have a hard time getting past my mental/emotional preconceptions re: some foodstuffs.
A lot of people are like that. No prob, more for the rest of us.