‘Always say yes to a bag of testicles’: A defence of offal
Like a character straight out of a Carry On film, the Turkish butcher leaned forward, looked my partner in the eye, and, with a heavy accent and an evil glint, said simply: “Testicles. Testicles.” Then, by way of explanation: “Sheep’s balls.”
Though things had taken a surreal and vaguely vulgar turn, his strange sales pitch has opened my eyes to a whole new world of carnivorous possibilities. Suddenly, I noticed the multitude of trays laden with offal, the whole hog of gleaming, gloopy treats and mysterious, meaty morsels.
Somehow, moments later, we left clutching a packet of prairie oysters – balls! – and several other bags filled with assorted animal parts that sound like a witch’s shopping list. Our haul: chicken hearts, calf’s kidneys, sheep’s testicles (also known as lamb fries) and calf’s liver. That’s an awful lot of offal. And you know what? It was delicious.
Turning organs into delicacies is where the real alchemy of cooking happens. It takes real heart (and lungs) to turn the unloved and unwanted into the unbelievable and sublime. To name but a few dishes derived from this forbidden fruit: haggis, black pudding, roast bone marrow, bone marrow butter and hog’s pudding (to the best of my knowledge, you can’t get proper hog’s pudding in London, so, like contraband, my mum recently smuggled some of this delicious regional delicacy up from Devon). I adore them all.
Getting squeamish about offal is, of course, a particularly British – or perhaps Anglo Saxon – attitude. The French have no compunctions about serving up barely contained sacks of intestine in their andouille sausage and further afield cultures have been dining on everything from chicken’s feet to lamb’s brains for time immemorial. In our age of rising costs of living and worries about intensive farming, it’s time we caught up, frankly.
I challenge any meat-eater with a pulse to turn their nose up at the smoky delight of char-grilled chicken hearts, best enjoyed over hot coals with a cold beer in one hand and a pitta in the other. Or the mind-bendingly delicious crispy sweetbreads, made from the thymus glands of calves or lambs, God’s own chicken nuggets. And my slow-cooked lamb’s heart goulash is a winner, too.
In a world that seems to recoil at the notion of eating red meat, let alone offal, there is something noble in the idea of nose-to-tail eating. There is even an old German saying about pigs that sums up this attitude to waste: “The only part of that hog wasted was the squeal.”
In the old days, a lot of these not-so-choice cuts made their way into pet food or animal feed alongside the likes of feather meal, a byproduct of intensive chicken farming made from baked feathers, used to pad out livestock fodder or as fertilizer. But the world has moved on, and so have the markets. There is, after all, money to be made from apparently uninviting things. Your pet’s loss is our gain. That butcher, in his spicy delivery, was a visionary of nose-to-tail eating. He reminded me that culinary awakening doesn’t just belong to distant travels. It’s here, on your high street, waiting behind the glass counter, whispering at you to build up the courage to point and say, “Let’s try that.”
• Andy is City PM’s picture editor and runs the blog fishingintheriversoflife.co.uk