Offal
Jonathan Ray The Spectator
For some reason - such as sheer bloody-mindedness - a few
days after his 75th birthday my father announced that he
could keep up the charade no longer and was coming out as a
vegetarian. He did add, however, that his particular wing of
vegetarianism regarded oxtail and oysters as honorary
vegetables. A few weeks later he widened this dispensation
to include pig's trotters, especially those in jelly. It
always seemed rather a capricious diet to me - offal or
tofu. In any case it proved too much for my mother, who
skilfully put an end to any further septuagenarian silliness
by serving him a dish of baked turnip stuffed with semolina.
I thought of him the other week in France, when I spotted
tripe à la mode on a menu. Sadly, on ordering, I was told by
a doleful waiter, 'Alas, monsieur, we are a little low in
the tripes today.' At least in France it isn't a rarity to
see offal on a menu or indeed in the supermarkets, whereas
in these days of sanitised pre-packaged meat it is virtually
impossible to find decent offal in England. Even chickens
don't come with their giblets any more.
Since sampling his sublime homemade sausages I've been
cultivating our local butcher, and I got terribly excited
when I saw a tray of pig's trotters in his window. I bought
four - at 30p each - although I wasn't quite sure what I
was going to do with them. My wife finally agreed to pop
them into some cassoulet she had spent the best part of a
week preparing, but confessed to finding them rather grim
to handle. And this from a girl whose mum boils pigs' heads
for brawn!
Apart from at my in-laws, I have yet to find a better place
for offal than the Smithfield restaurant St John, co-owned
by the guru of nose-to-tail eating, Fergus Henderson, whom I
joined for lunch last week. I suppose that a throbbing
hangover is not the most sensible of conditions in which to
approach a meal consisting of extreme examples of offal - a
word which refers to the organs and extremities of a beast -
and I did rather regret my kümmel-swilling of the previous
night. The sight of two dead sucking pigs in the open
kitchen, lying pale and waxy on the slab, their stomachs
slit open ready to receive a serious stuffing, did stop me
briefly in my tracks, as did Fergus's whispered promise, 'We
have rather a nice bit of pig's spleen up our sleeve for the
first course.'
A glass of Ruinart, combined with Fergus's infectious
enthusiasm for all things offal, helped me to get a grip as
I studied the menu and I suddenly realised that I was
remarkably hungry. Having had no problem deciding on my main
course, I allowed myself to be goaded by Fergus into
splitting three starters with him. First up was a plate of
St John's signature dish, roast bone marrow and parsley
salad. Taken from the middle leg of a calf, these were five
or six inches of bone, within the tube of which nestled some
deliciously jelly-like marrow. I can assure you that there
is no more pleasurable or efficient a hangover cure than a
piece of warm, creamy and unctuous marrow, freshly scooped
from the bone, spread on wholemeal toast and sprinkled
lightly with rock salt and plenty of flat-leaf parsley.
Until I ate it I hadn't realised that this is what I had
been craving all morning. 'Ah, yes,' agreed Fergus, when I
admitted to my parlous state, confident that I was now on
the mend. 'Bone marrow does indeed have a remarkably
steadying and uplifting quality.'
A tasty confit of pig's tongue in duck fat served with
shredded celeriac followed, after which I was invited to
tuck into an elegant 'Swiss roll' of spleen, bacon and
sage, accompanied by chopped gherkins, red onion and red-
wine vinegar. 'I can't understand why more people don't eat
spleen,' said Fergus. 'It's a beautifully behaved organ and
cruelly overlooked. Nobody minds eating liver, which
filters heaven-knows-what in the body, but they always
ignore the spleen.'
The main course of pigeon and pig's trotter pie is one of
those dishes that sad people like me dream about when we
should be having healthy and invigorating dreams about
Claudia Schiffer. I had three helpings of it, with just
enough buttered cabbage to keep scurvy at bay. Set under a
crisp brown lid of fresh suet, the pigeon breasts -
notorious for being dry - had been kept astonishingly moist
thanks to what Fergus calls 'trotter gear'. The secret, he
told me, is to braise some trotters in madeira, chicken
stock and vegetables until the flesh falls off the bone,
after which it will set into a gloopily meaty jelly as it
cools. This jelly, Fergus assured me, is one of the great
gastronomic tools. Meats prone to drying out, such as pigeon
and venison, are invariably improved from being cooked in
it, and it is an obligatory ingredient in coq au vin in the
Henderson household.
I swear that Fergus became quite misty-eyed as he spoke of
his love of offal. 'Chicken necks make great snacks, as does
sliced ox heart and chips,' he said. 'And there's nothing of
a pig that you can't use. Indeed, it seems so rude to the
animal not to eat every bit of it, be it the tongue, heart,
stomach, spleen, chitterlings, kidneys, snout, ears,
trotters or tail.'
I told him that he was making me nostalgic for that great
English delicacy, the Bath chap - a breadcrumbed piece of
fatty pig's cheek combined with a sliver of tongue - which I
had barely seen since my childhood. 'You should have said!'
exclaimed Fergus. 'We've got Bath chap on the menu at St
John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields.' A hurried phone call
to his other establishment confirmed that there was one Bath
chap left, whereupon I was hustled out of the restaurant and
into a cab. What finer reason to dash across town than in
quest of a Bath chap?
As we sped through the City, we reminisced about our
favourite dishes and memorable meals with the same hushed
reverence used by fortysomething soccer nerds to discuss FA
Cup-winning teams of the 1970s. I recalled some wild boar
that I had eaten in France as a youngster, on which occasion
the chef, tickled by my delighted enjoyment, had presented
me solemnly with the animal's tusks, while Fergus eulogised
about a birthday breakfast of devilled kidneys and black
velvet that he had once had in Scotland.
It was a crushing blow to discover that some rotter had
nabbed my Bath chap from behind the waiter's back just as he
was confirming its existence on the phone, and Fergus looked
utterly bereft on my behalf. 'Never mind,' he consoled me,
'you must come back again and I'll make sure that the finest
of all Bath chaps awaits you. Done well, when the cheek has
done enough exercise and the fat's all creamy and the tongue
is tender, a Bath chap is like the oyster of a bird, a real
hidden treasure.'
And when, I'd like to know, did you last hear someone extol
a lentil in such terms?