Odds Bits … They’re Offal

Jennifer McLagan
Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal
HarperCollins Canada
ISBN: 978-1-55468-756-5
256 pp.
$39.99

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.  — James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

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Why do I like Jennifer McLagan’s new work Odd Bits? There are several reasons. It is, for instance, just one of those volumes by the Toronto-based McLagan that bridges so well the “foodbook-cookbook” divide. It does so with a confident and knowledgeable bravado and a sparkling and economic prose as well as some great recipes for things like trotters and testicles.

There’s more at play here, though. There’s an underlying message that does not well-up falsely out of the simmering stock or from behind the mesentery that holds a liver in place in the body cavity. This is real stuff, with real food. And it’s important stuff.

At once a collection of intriguing and unique recipes–but with accessible ones of more “main stream” cuts of animal–McLagan’s follow-up to her delicious Bones and Fat books, (the latter a James Beard Foundation winner) is both much needed in the larder of culinary books and philosophy and one that is a long time coming.

Aside from good cooking fun, I see Odd Bits as a bit of a corrective; it attempts to adjust and make up for a significant oversight with the way we’ve been eating for a very long time. Too long. Plus the fact that it also has some really wild things to cook.

Odd Bits: cooking from nose to tail.

It makes sense on McLagan’s part, of course, to start the book off with a recipe from the front of the animal–it’s nose to tail eating that’s been the rage over the last few years–and McLagan’s first salvo is a bold and heady one indeed: head cheese. You won’t see many folks dropping a fresh pig’s head into a pot of water even on the oddest and rarest of occasions, but when the delicacy is done well it can be very good indeed (see the photograph below).

From then on, as its title only gently alludes to, McLagan’s book spans the offal gamut, from tripe, kidney and tongue to a heart tartare and on to the more forbidding pig ear salad, crispy testicles with a briny caper sauce, and pig-blood ice cream–which could change completely that little schoolyard rhyme that has me screaming and you screaming for the cool dairy treat.

Odd Bits is bold. And it’s beautiful. But yet, it is practical with several cooking basics and techniques explained, a healthy dollop of culinary history added here and there, with a dash of wit to boot: it only makes sense that that opening salvo starts at head of the animal, right?

Although there more comfortable, less fearful cuts of meat and recipes to pursue, the question still arises: who is going to cook heart and balls and tongue and brain, even if Fergus Henderson (and I paraphrase) waxed poetic that his recipe for sweetbreads (the euphemistic thymus gland) provides a nice crunch before you break thorough to fluffy “cloud”?

Head cheese by chef Darryl Haus, The 41 restaurant, Kitchener.

Well, the answer is certainly chefs and hard-core foodies. (A sidebar, Nick Benninger at Uptown 21 in Waterloo is preparing a multi-course “Odd Bits” dinner, to coincide nicely with the haggis-laden Robbie Burns Day, with McLagan in the front-of-house describing to diners the dishes and the intricacies of their flavour profiles and the techniques used. This kind of event is what a growing, healthy food culture needs).

To me though the question of who is a misaligned one and one posed only upon seeing the cover and reading the title of the book: there is a lot more to consider. If you eat meat (and even if you don’t eat meat, though as McLagan will tell you humans were made to eat meat), you should read this book because it recuperates and reinvigorates a part of our food-past that has sadly slipped away.

Of course, the book–and the approach–is not for everyone: that I will grant. Yet, every carnivore should give the odd bit or two the odd try, despite the fact that there’s more to it than mere experimentation for experimentation’s  sake and stepping outside of your cooking comfort zone with yet another grilled sirloin (not that there is anything wrong with that).

Here’s where the foodbook-cookbook issue touches down: Odd Bits is a bit of a reclamation project that derives its impetus, in my interpretation, from the raging farm-to-fork movements that are all around us. McLagan endeavours to reclaim a cooking style and techniques that need to be resurrected, re-presented and put back on the dinner table. And boldly so. It is not a mere archiving of lost cuts and the way our figurative and archetypal “grandmothers” cooked in their day; it is not an historical document that is meant to be a passive, coffee-table tome, I don’t believe. No, it seeks to re-animate and re-engage us here and now with a way we use to eat (and a moral one, she will say)–from nose to tail. It teaches us how to do that again.

Lamb head and testicles.

Though I never saw it on her table, my very archetypal but very real Nonna used to cook tongue long ago, for my father and his sisters. It was a traditional, succulent and nutritious meal. And an inexpensive one. It seems that cooking tongue skipped my generation, a generation that includes many Canadians like me, but here it is now with McLagan showing us how to do it in 2011. The technique–the reconnection with the odd bits–is an important one in a post-industrial, mass-production food milieu where 100 cows go into making a single decrepit QSR “burger” patty.

McLagan’s culinary experience touches down in Canada, France and Australia, and I believe she has the credibility to deliver these multiple messages: have fun cooking some really unusual stuff, commune with your real grandmother, and change the way you think about food without getting all crazy and ideologically didactic and weighty about it. Food show be fun, delicious and responsible.

Ultimately, at the end of the simmering pot of pig’s head, it’s clear she recognizes and promulgates the moral issues in and around slaughtering animals and eating them. She cites Henderson a guru in the nose-to-tail eating world and a cookbook colleague (and here I’m paraphrasing McLagan): “if we are going to knock an animal on the head, it’s our responsibility to do the right thing and eat all of it.”

I agree. Bon appetit!