Free Offal: A Global History by Nina Edwards

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Definitions and Ideas

    What might the term ‘offal’ include? The Chambers Dictionary’s definition sounds a little less than enthusiastic: ‘waste or rejected parts esp. of a carcass: an edible part cut off in dressing a carcass, esp. entrails, heart, liver, kidney, tongue etc.: anything worthless or unfit for use.’ 1 Other edible innards not specified here include connective tissue, bone marrow, lungs, spleen, sweetbreads, testicles, udders, tripe, heads and the features thereof (brains, eyes, cheeks, snout or muzzle and ears), skin, tails, trotters, lard and blood. Offal is sometimes thought of as inner organs and viscera alone, but I include all edible exterior parts. In markets across the globe offal is openly displayed alongside livestock and carcasses. However, the colourful posters displayed in some Western butchers’ shops, showing the division of available cuts, rarely include offal, suggesting there is sometimes a need for diplomacy – even secrecy – about eating such body parts.
    The terms we use can be gently euphemistic, as in melt or milt for spleen; lights for lungs; brawn or headcheese for brains; crackling for crisp skin; and prairie oysters, mountain tendergroins, cowboy caviar, rocky mountains, fries and swinging beef for testicles. Bath chap refers to pig cheek and lower and sometimes upper jaw; chitterlings or chitlings are intestines; haslet is a loaf of pig offal; chine is backbone; faggots are offal balls; and Gaelic drisheen is a pudding of sheep intestine stuffed with blood and cereal. 2 Sometimes one body part is presented as another, as when testicles are termed sweetbreads (the correct term for pancreas or thymus gland) or kidneys in the case of cockerel’s testes, rognons blanc in French. 3 Sometimes the nomenclature for offal is disturbingly graphic or biological, as with udder, penis, birth canal and bladder. All sound like they come from some familiar doggerel, replete with medical, pornographic and Carry On film-style suggestiveness. Offal can seem both childishly smutty and too grown-up. Even the terminology used by the butchery trade can obfuscate, as when penis is termed pizzle.

    Most probably used to advertise available cuts, this wooden model of a butcher’s shop, c. 1850, is now a reminder of how meat was once commonly sold.

    Paul Sandby, Any Tripe or Neats or Calves Feet... , part of a series of etchings, Twelve London Cries Done from Life , 1760. Ragged and careworn, the vendor wheels his barrow of calves’ feet and other parts, calling out for business.
    These lists are not exhaustive, but demonstrate the size and range of the subject. The ingredient parts form a complex chain in the anatomy of beasts and inevitably recall our own physical, meaty make-up. It is possible, it is said, to eat all but the feathers or fur, talons and teeth. All but the squeal of the pig.
    Perhaps there is some inherent meaning in the word. itself. ‘Offal’ suggests what falls off or away after the animal is slaughtered and what is left after the butcher has taken his prime cuts: the inner parts of an animal, that stew of slippery organs, glands, vessels, blood and tissue. Thus the term can suggest something that is less important, being only a byproduct of the butcher’s art. Hieatt and Butler, in their medieval cookbook, quote a recipe from Arundel where the verbal connotation is latent: ‘Take garbage of capons, and of hennes, and of chekyns, and of dowes, and make hem clene’ (my italics). This suggests that offal is inferior to other meat and should be discarded as of no value, even as something dirty and disease-ridden. Shakespeare refers to rotting bodies as offal in Hamlet ( II , 2): ‘I should have fatted all the region kites/With this slave’s offal.’
    The word ‘offal’ is etymologically linked with afval in Dutch, the German Abfall or Offall, avfall in Norwegian and Swedish, affald in Danish and abats in French. All of these words imply rubbish or animal waste and