Hey, food fighters! Sorry I’ve been away. Cuisine en Locallers, JJ, Trevor and I spent the last five days frantically running around and preparing for an event where we fed almost 40 brave souls nine beautiful and CREEPY courses for some gruesome Halloween fun. So, in honor of my first O.N.C.E. dinner, I thought I would do a special post about the ingredient that was displayed so prominently this past Friday night: offal (or organ meat, in layman’s terms).
Offal, in my family and probably in yours, was not overly prized or appreciated. I have memories growing up of an old babysitter and dear friend of the family inviting my parents, my brother and I for liver and onions, and I remember thinking as I confronted this piece of pasty, grainy, funny-smelling meat, that liver was, quite possibly, the worst food imaginable. My parents and babysitter begged to differ. Nevertheless – it still wasn’t served very often.
Fast forward 10 years. I had just discovered French cookery, and liver, combined with cognac or port, fried, and pureed or lightly sauteed to warm and creamy.. was the most delicious food imaginable. I ate it at every opportunity. I’m actually surprised I didn’t end up with gout.
Offal doesn’t occupy a very large space on the American plate, possibly because we don’t understand it. But it’s good, my friends! You’ll see. It’s also cheap and nutritious (relatively low in calories, high in protein and iron, among other things).
Liver, in the grand scheme of offal, is only the tip of the iceberg. And really quite tame. Preparing for the O.N.C.E. dinner, I had the priviledge (!) of handling no less than five different parts of four different animals: chicken livers, lamb and rabbit kidneys, rabbit and chicken hearts, lamb tongue, and pig head. Chicken livers are old hat – marinate them in port or cognac for a couple of days, saute them lightly in loads of butter until mostly cooked through, puree e voila! You’ve got a killer pate. You don’t have to do anything for them in terms of prep – you just pour them (splat) into your pan and cook ‘em.
Kidneys are different. Whether they’re lamb or rabbit or some other animal, they come encased in a thin membrane, and also contain interior and exterior pockets of fat which need to be removed before cooking. They REEK TO HIGH HELL – a sort of uric, metallic smell that gets all over your hands when you’re handling them and that makes you wonder if you’ll ever be able to scrub it off. That bad. At Cuisine en Locale, we generally don’t have a hierarchy in the kitchen, but in this case, the process of prepping the kidneys was definitely a job for the low man on the totem pole – me. So, I sucked it up, took the slippery, smelly organ in my hand, and started by peeling off the membrane. Once the membrane was off, I cut the (lamb) kidneys into quarters (or the rabbit kidneys in half) to dig out the fat that butterflies around the center of the meat. I then washed my hands REPEATEDLY.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to try this dish as I was frantically bussing and plating throughout the entire dinner service. I’m told though, that despite the rank stench of raw kidneys and the distinct smell of kidneys cooking, they actually do have a quite pleasant taste. If you’re going to take the plunge, do something akin to what we did – cook them in butter, onions, and cream and make a sort of fricasse. Serve on puff pastry.
For our fifth course, we served rabbit and chicken hearts Churrascaria-style (cooked on skewers). The prep involved me, wrist-deep, in a prep pan of hearts (marinated in olive oil, salt and pepper), gazing, facinated with the early-morning anatomy lesson I was receiving. I threaded the metal skewers with the little hearts, leaving a little bit of room between each so that they would all be cooked evenly. At O.N.C.E. we cooked them rapidly under a broiler, about a minute on each side, and an additional minute on the first side. I was able to taste a chicken heart, and was pleasantly surprised. It was good! A little chewy (having gotten a considerable amount of exercise in its life), but very, very tasty. The rabbit hearts were a bit more tender, according to O.N.C.E.-ers.
The seventh course involved tongue. So good to eat, kinda gross to handle. The best method I’ve heard thusfar (and the one Cuisine en Locale used this time) is to brine the tongue in a solution of water, a tablespoon of salt, a little sugar, bay leaves, and other pickling spices. Let sit for a couple of days, and then boil in the liquid. This is one of those situations where a crockpot is really useful, so that you can just let it sit for hours, stewing in its own juices. Now comes the fun part: once the tongue is done, pull it out of the liquid and let it cool. Refrigerate. When you pull it out, you’ll see that there’s a layer of membrane surrounding it. You’ll also observe some taste buds. Those taste buds need to be scraped off, and you need to pierce and peel the membrane off. Literally – pull and peel. Then slice.
La piece de resistence of the night involved pig head, from Stillman’s Farm. This, too, was brined in a similar solution, then rendered down by cooking for several hours with herbs and other aromatics (read this interesting and informative article on them). Once cooked, Trev cut the meat off the head and continued to render it down, a process which resulted in a mixture of aspic (meat jello, essentially), fat, and the most tender and delicious meat I have had the privilege of tasting as of late. My role as apprentice involved picking the aromatics from the meat, and separating the meat from the gelatin.
Just a little warning: we documented this entire process, so watch for pictures to come, mwahahaha!
People who came to the O.N.C.E. dinner Friday night ate these meats voluntarily, even with aplomb. What about you? Would you eat them? Were you forced to eat them as a kid?
Copyright Vintage Eats 2009
