For those misguided souls who failed to purhcase the soon-to-be-priceless first edition of Eating the Apple, here's the first in a series of extracts.
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Wise reader, you do not need me to tell you that one of the phenomena of the “noughts,” as we must apparently call the decade expiring, is the renaissance of offal as a fine dining ingredient. In New York, and not only here, we regale ourselves with oxtail and tripe, and assume a menu misprinted if sweetbreads and a pig’s foot are not to be found. This is quite a turnaround. There was a day, believe me, when hardly a restaurant in town served a cheeseboard, and many New York diners thought tripe a kind of fish.
Funnily enough, that latter whimsy rears its head in a recent New York Observer review of the phenomenon, “We’re Gaga for Guts!” by Meredith Bryan. As Ms Bryan points out, “offal—the animal parts that fall off the butcher table, like the entrails, head and feet—has progressed from a rare delicacy at risk-taking restaurants like Babbo, Prune and Michael White’s now-defunct Fiamma to a ubiquity of near–pork-belly proportions.” Among the exotica which have caught the imagination of the city – trotters, liver, and even kidneys. As an Englishman, raised by a cockney mother, I have to heave a sigh. Liver and bacon was a weekly dish in my childhood and kidneys were often breakfast. By no means unusual, not just for an Englishman of my generation, but for other Europeans – and, interestingly, for quite a few Americans too, if one extends one’s purview beyond a narrow segment of the population. Of course, even in terms of white tablecloth dining, what we are seeing is a regression not an evolution. Brains and sweetbreads – delicate fare and stalwarts of “la cuisine classique” – were fixtures on swanky menus until at least the nineteen sixties. Kidneys too, as “rognons de veau.” Pig’s feet, stuffed with foie gras and truffles admittedly, persisted on top London menus through the nineteen eighties. But why this sudden reversion to eating the bits butchers throw away?
The answer is to be found, not in the fickle palates of New York trend-setters, but in the even more precarious trajectory of the New York economy. Chefs honestly like offal. They have always wanted to sneak a bit onto the menu. They now have a reason to do so. Restaurant overheads, especially leases, have climbed steadily year by year. The price of ingredients, thanks in particular to the cost of transportation, has risen too. But when it’s hard to fill seats, one thing which cannot be permitted to rise is the cost of an entrée. Think about it. If you were eating out in this city ten years ago, what did you pay for a main course? Twenty bucks in an averagely decent restaurant maybe, rising steadily through the thirties as you went upmarket, peaking around forty-eight or fifty dollars at Lespinasse or for a big hunk of dry-aged beef at a good steakhouse.
Er, wait a minute. That’s what we pay today, even though just about every cost involved in running a restaurant has gone up. Restaurateurs are not dumb; those seats must be filled. The difference is that, by and large, we are paying those prices for beef shin rather than filet mignon, veal breast rather than escalopes, pork belly rather than loin, lamb neck rather than rack. Not to mention that we are paying quite a lot for hamburger, chicken and anything barbecued. The genius of the restaurant community lays in successfully persuading customers that this is what, or how, they want to eat. Of course, widening our focus, there are many New Yorkers who are entirely accustomed to eating these delicacies. Even Ms Bryan of the Observer acknowledges that the city’s Chinese, Dominican and other communities traditionally consume these inexpensive cuts. I wonder why? Of course, both closer to home and metaphorically more distant, there is something called “soul food.” Yes, Americans too – some Americans – cherish a tradition of pig’s feet and chitterlings and oxtail and tripe, a tradition born from, yes, poverty.
Whenever someone tells you we are eating more exotically because our tastes have changed, remind them of James Carville (or was it Karl Marx?): “It’s the economy, stupid.”
I do wonder why some tignhs are considered such a novelty even though they've been eaten forever (well not forever but almost). It is tradition to take care of an entire animal rather than to let it go to waste. I use chicken liver to enrich a bolognese but stay away from offal per se. I've had numerous health issues so there's something with me and anatomical structures that just doesn't go together any more, besides meat as such. I have however eaten slowly cooked stuffed pig's heart and a favourite of the household is blood "pudding", fried and served with lingonberry jam (substitute cranberry). There are recipes for pig's feet and cow mule sallad in Germany (maul salat). The latter is very nice. The former is not for me. Neither is tripes, which I ate in Italy. If I have to I can eat just about anything and sometimes you just don't argue. Only recently did I have haggis. A dish I had many pre-conceived notions about. Basically we are just spoiled. The food world reinvent the wheel over and over. The rest of us continue eating as we have all along pretty much, with some additions over time.
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