With marriage came my mother-in-law’s 1953 House and Garden New Cook Book, revised and reprinted in 1962. From the opening chapter on meal planning to the closing on table settings the book is filled with annotations, now yellowed magazine and newspaper clippings, and letters to my wife with written-out recipes, each in its proper place. Turn to the variety meats section, however, and you’ll find pages as pristine as when they came off the press.
The World War II Department of Defense created the term ‘variety meats,’ a euphemism for liver, brains, sweetbreads, oxtail, kidney, tongue and tripe. Meat, especially premium cuts of beef, veal, and pork which the department needed to feed GIs, was rationed, but the level of rationing wasn’t sufficient. The department’s Committee on Food Habits decided the path to further reducing the consumption of these meats lay in encouraging Americans to eat more organ meats. The first step to achieving this goal was a campaign to replace the off-putting, then commonly used ‘offal’ with the less descriptive, more benign ‘variety meats.’ While the campaign was successful for the duration of the war, when rationing ended Americans reverted to eating steaks and chops. Only the term ‘variety meats’ remained.
The word ‘offal’ is derived from the fifteen-century Dutch affal, meaning that which is discarded as waste. Dictionaries other than The Oxford English Dictionary, which presents word definitions in the order they came into use, give a word’s sense according to its most common usage. The Webster, Merriam, Collier, and American Heritage, to cite a few, define offal as:
1. Waste material or byproducts from a manufacturing process.
2. Meat, including internal organs (such as liver, heart, or kidney) and extremities (such as tail or hooves), that has been taken from a part other than skeletal muscles.
3. Refuse; rubbish. To my mind definition three is a necessary qualifier of number two.
One of the rewards of reaching my majority was choosing to avoid calf’s liver. My mother cycled through a list of menus that included it. I dreaded the day liver would appear at the dinner table. It was undoubtedly prepared as it should be; mother was an excellent cook. Being a boy to rarely refuse, I ate, thankful for the accompanying bacon. After I left for college and until her death, she never served calf’s liver when I returned home to visit. It may have been a small sacrifice to avoid displeasing me.
“If you ask anyone why he shudders away from grilled calf’s liver,” M.F.K. Fisher observes, “he will murmur a seemingly haphazard excuse, usually drawing, to prove his point, on childhood shock, racial traits, and what his grandmother told him once. And yet he purrs like a happy cat when confronted with a fine jar of truffled liver pâté!” Guilty as charged. I love pâtés whether of duck, chicken, or pig’s liver, fine or coarse.
Known for their fondness of steak and kidney pudding, the English also enjoy haggis (chopped lungs, liver and heart stuffed into a sheep’s stomach), faggot (meatballs made of pig’s offal), haslet (heart, liver and sweetbreads cooked in small pieces), and petstick (offal sausage). Apparently this fondness was lost at sea during the migration of 17th-century religious dissenters and later English immigrants to America. As a rule, to this day we rarely eat organ meats, regardless of the term which refers to them.
I was not disappointed to find that Julia Child excluded tripe from her phenomenally popular Mastering the Art of French Cooking (she had to stop somewhere, she explains in the preface). Mastering does include basic recipes and their variations for Foie de Veau, Ris de Veau, Cervelles and Rognons de Veau et de Mouton. Like the Sirens luring sailors to their island with their song, the melodious names of these recipes have tempted me, if fleetingly, to leave behind my dislike of offal and serve up French calf’s liver, sweetbreads, brains, and kidneys.
Should I return to Paris and find myself one evening on a small gas lit street of the Marais district, in a restaurant unknown to guide books and hotel concierges but revered by patrons for its impeccable roast chicken, where only French is spoken and waiters wear crisply pressed white aprons that fall to their shoes, a restaurant whose matron hovers at the door to greet guests while watching to correct the slightest unwelcome problem, I might order Tripes à la mode de Caen, a classic stew of tripe, ox feet, onion, celery, and aromatics in cider and apple brandy. It is claimed that the tripe in this dish, served in gravy with sliced carrots, is tender, sweet and succulent. Until then I’ll limit my offal to an occasional smear of pâté on a toasted baguette.
A self-taught and widely exhibited photo-based artist, Christopher Harris has explored the light and land of the Pacific Northwest from his Seattle home for 25 years. After receiving a Masters Degree in religion and the arts from Boston University, Harris went on to receive a doctoral degree from Brown University’s American Civilization Program. Routledge Press published Public Lives, Private Virtues, Harris’s cultural study of images of American revolutionary heroes. His essays have appeared in Renascence Journal, The Southern Literary Journal, TheNew York Times and The Adelaide Literary Magazine.
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