Free Offal: A Global History by Nina Edwards Page A

do not necessarily refer to food.
    The word is a gift to the comedian. A number of offal-related words, such as giblets, sweetbreads and tripe, have become part of the comedian’s lexicon; our laughter betrays our unease. In Yorkshire fat men are sometimes affectionately called Giblets. The heavy metal bands Offal and Necrophagist draw on offal’s associated vocabulary and imagery in their lyrics, with ‘Fermented Offal Discharge’ a hit for the latter. Offal News, a political and economic blog, and TV Offal , a UK Channel 4 sketch show of the late 1990s, borrow offal’s in herent sense of subversion to suggest satire. It can also be a term of abuse. To be ‘de-offaled’ has become a metaphor for distress, more graphic than ‘gutted’. The word ‘offal’ is also used for the leftover scraps in glass-cutting and for fabric remnants too small to be of further use.
    The sound of the word is rounded and soft on the palate, phonetically minor in key. It could be said to make a seductive shape in the mouth: the open vowel; the gentler sound of the ‘ff’; the pleasing closure of the ‘l’. Nonetheless, the accident that ‘offal’ can be homophonous with ‘awful’ contributes to some of the negative or comic associations the word invites.

    Ruth Dupré, Butchery , 2010, sculpture. Heavy, glistening glass ox tongue forms fall from a butcher’s block.

    The varied textures of tripe, from silky seersucker to mohair blanket.
    Raw offal can seem more raw, more visceral than other meat, reminding us of a time before cooking, when early man tore into bloody prey. It suggests the crazed or defiant, like Diogenes and his alleged diet of raw flesh and creepy-crawlies. The challenge of offal comes alive in a description of learning to cook in China. Fuchsia Dunlop is determined to enjoy the ‘silken strands’ and ‘tender flesh’ of fish eyes, yet cannot help but empathize with her father’s reluctance as he masticates ‘rubbery goose intestine’. 4
    The extra-meatiness of offal is often part of the appeal. Next to the chewy, gristly, bloodily robust offal, other meats can seem insipid. Some avoid offal because it seems uglier than other cuts; conversely, some baulk at the idea of eating the inner parts of cute animals that remind us all too easily of ourselves and our own fragile bodies.
    From tongue and beak in Sichuan Province to gizzard stew on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, from elegant Parisian bonnes bouches to spicy cartilage in the dust bowl of Calcutta, nose to tail eating is widespread. Offal is a food which represents the most elevated haute cuisine and yet also celebrates the ingenuity of the poverty-stricken. In France offal is still referred to as les parties nobles (‘the noble pieces’). Italians deem offal la cucina povera , the food of the poor, its many age-old and more refined dishes springing from necessity, as in Douglas Houston’s poem ‘With the Offal Eaters’: ‘putting each beast killed to its full use / Their wives chop offal finely twice a week.’ 5
    Most of the world eats offal. The cuisines of the Middle and Far East and Africa have always appreciated its qualities, while the great chefs of North America and Europe may rejoice in new opportunities to raise awareness of the culinary potential of these meats. The question remains whether ideas about ‘real’ food, advocated by American chef Chris Cosentino and Pierre Orsi in France, represent anything more than a fantasy – albeit an ambiguous and highly charged one – for the West. It may be that these ideas fail to affect day-to-day food choices. Moreover, there is a marked distinction between those who dress offal up in creamy sauces or combine it with non-offal meats as if to mask its identity, disguising its natural form, texture and scent, and those who prefer, like Fergus Henderson in his St John restaurant near Smithfield Market in London, to layoffal bare: with, say, suckling pig’s brains served simply and without