By Michael Jewell
I don’t like to be reminded of the time I tried to cook my own chicken hearts, but the memory remains along with the smell of dried blood permanently seared into the bottom of my heavy iron cooking pan. Esteemed as royalty in the court of truly nasty victuals, those chicken innards rank easily at the top of my worst meals of all time, beating out mom’s Chicken Tetrazzini – that one bad childhood dish out of dozens of great ones, served month after month – and week-old sea urchin roe suspended in a snot-like mash of Japanese yam. These are dishes whose sheer horribleness compels me from beyond the grave to remember, and to appreciate every bite.
Ask your parents about liver and onions, that horror of horrors that swelled their own vital organs with excess Vitamin A. For every person that reviles the stuff, there’s someone else who cherishes it. As artists, we play with making things great that don’t have to be. A delicious meal is no more nutritious than a basic one, but bless the cook who transfigures a lamb’s face or a sheep’s kidneys into something truly desirable. A beautiful steak grills itself, but the trappings of poverty, those various parts from nose to tail and all throughout the animal require skill and care just to be servable to mixed company.
These days, ordinary cow’s liver is hard to find on a menu. A few mad men like London’s Fergus Henderson from St. John’s Bread and Wine follow the impulse to revive working-man’s food for the opposite end of the economic scale, while ordinary folk who used to have to eat the nasty stuff willfully choke down pink, bloodless (and tasteless) mystery-meat formed into pleasing cubes by far-away hands. Now, I won’t turn my nose up at lunchmeat, but it does creep me out. When I gave up vegetarianism, I decided that if I couldn’t see myself killing, cleaning and cooking my own beast, then I had no business eating it. I also decided to not miss out on the good stuff.
For those who look, Savannah has secret places for beef tongue tacos, the tongue being the finest, most tender, beefy-tasting part, and spicy menudo, the tripe centered south-of-the-border hangover cure. Near-raw eye-round steak in your bowl of pho is nice, but next time, try the soft cow’s tendon, called gaan, as well.
I’ve found that other innard-enthusiasts can be a little disingenuous, as not every little bit is a hidden delicacy. While the Filipino dish Dinguan deliciously pairs pork with its own blood, the pig’s liver is grainy and disgusting. As mentioned before, a sea urchin’s creamy, mustard-yellow eggs can be an unparalleled delight or a gag-reflex inducing dud depending on its freshness, and tripe, in any form, is by my estimation the most difficult part of any animal, ever, to prepare, and depends dish by dish, cook by cook. If you venture into mysterious eating territory, much less try to cook some of this for yourself, expect to hit a few big, ugly walls. The joy you will be a part of, when a difficult dish is pulled off by someone who loves it, will be worth the trip.
