Offally Good

Cooking from Snout to Tail

by Peter Barrett and photographs by Jennifer May, January 31, 2011

Offal is an awful word. It’s the opposite of appetizing. But the things it describes—organs, ears, tails, tongues, tendons, and the like—are some of the most interesting and rewarding foods there are. Depending on your ethnic background, you’re probably already familiar with one or more offal dishes. Tongue sandwiches, menudo (beef stomach in broth), chitterlings, beef tendon soup, liverwurst, steak and kidney pie—chances are you already love something offal. It’s meatier. Deeper. (Sometimes) fattier. You can’t get that flavor anywhere else. And there’s so much more.

Rich Reeve, chef/owner of Elephant wine bar in Kingston, is a man who knows his way around esoteric animal parts. He produces an astonishing array of excellent tapas from a very simple (no stove!) kitchen, regularly including terrines, tacos, stews, and pâtés made from organs and offcuts. The plates are small, so it’s easy to be adventurous, and he won’t steer you wrong. For Reeve, as for many others, his conversion to this kind of food came in the form of English chef Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating (Ecco, 1999). It’s a poetically written little cookbook that has been hugely influential. “The way he wrote, the way he sounded—I got excited,” Reeve remembers, and he hasn’t looked back.

Reeve says that there are only two things about meat that matter: “You need to know where it comes from and you need to eat the whole thing. As carnivores, we owe it to the animal and the people who raised it properly.” And this notion, still a matter of clear necessity in much of the world, is now regaining traction in our country as an ethical, sustainable, and damn tasty way to eat meat. “It’s where the new flavors are,” Reeve continues. “It’s the new frontier.” So who better than he to be our guide to whole-beast cookery? I invited Reeve to come over and cook a variety of unconventional cuts to show how easy and how good they can be to make at home. Some body parts like brains or tripe may be too challenging for some people to imagine eating, so we limited ourselves to user-friendly things that make for extremely good eating.

A cow’s heart may look daunting, but prep is simple. Cut it open, trim away everything that isn’t deep red, and then cut the meat into half-inch strips or cubes. Grill or sautée the heart just to rare, and serve as tacos with hot salsa, queso fresco, cilantro, and crunchy radishes. The meat could also be marinated and threaded onto skewers to great effect. It’s intensely beefy and tender: steakier than steak. Reeve recently served raw heart at a large event, and people loved it, though he waited to tell them what they had eaten until after it was gone. And that’s revealing; any aversion we might have to eating these foods is cultural, not gustatory.

The key to good pig ears is long, slow cooking. In this case, Reeve instructed me to confit them beforehand, so I submerged them and a couple of tails in duck fat in a 180˚ oven overnight. They came out tender and lip-smackingly sticky with gelatin. Reeve sliced them into ribbons and quickly fried them into a crunchy tangle of porky goodness, arranging them in an iron skillet with chanterelles and pouring beaten eggs over the lot to set into a frittata that he topped with parsley and pea shoots. The tails got a quick sautée with some fiercely hot barbecue sauce before going on a plate with cilantro and lime wedges.