Nasty Bits

Some of the most amazing culinary transformations are rooted in a need for economy - often forced as a result of poverty -  and arise from a situation where one is forced to make do with the least desirable ingredients, minimal equipment, a paucity of fuel, or a combination thereof.  Certainly, it is far from shocking to make prime cuts of meat, fresh vegetables or finely milled wheat into delicious fare, although it is also possible to abuse good ingredients, through indifference or ignorance, into inedibility.  The culinary magic, sometimes bordering on the miraculous, takes place when careful handling transforms the neglected, the undesirable, and the cast off into delicious sustenance.

Perhaps the most classic examples come from the realm of meat cookery.  When an animal is slaughtered for food, there are lovely sterile diagrams that divide the beastie into manageable sections of muscle tissue, but there are also the many organs, the head, the feet, and tail, which these diagrams seldom address.  Some of this is because these elements of the carcass are completely self-evident and even the dimmest of apprentice butchers can remove them from the animal without destroying them.  In our instant-oatmeal society, however, how many of us would know what to do with fifty feet of pig intestines, or a sheep's head? 

If you had come, for example, from a Portuguese family you may not only know what to make from "everything but the squeal" of a pig - their culinary traditions celebrate the usage of every part - and even if you are at a loss in terms of exact preparation, you may have family resources to draw upon.  But if you come from a family or culture that is, like many, much removed from the direct preparation of a food animal, you might only taste such dishes in a specialty restaurant, and remain blissfully ignorant of their preparation or provenance. It is no secret that North American culture tends heavily toward waste; excess packaging aside, the population is affluent enough to choose primarily the prime cuts of the animal and let the rest be made into hotdogs and pet food.  Sure there are some markets, often catering to one of the ethnic communities, where you can find trotters or tripe or heart, but supermarkets outside the major centres are unlikely to stock much more than the main muscle cuts and occasional specialty game or selected imported charcuterie.

The food that is made by people who cannot afford to waste a single scrap of animal has astonishing diversity and innovation.  Soul food, much of which originates in the American south from the pre-emancipation black population, was built primarily on the foods that were allowed to the slaves - a combination of the animal bits deemed undesirable by the wealthy landowners (who were required, or had invested enough, to allow enough food to prevent starvation but were not moved to provide high quality food) and cornmeal, which was inexpensive, plentiful, and kept on hand to feed the livestock anyway.  Out of such meager allowance, came dishes such as chitterlings (aka "chitlins") from pig intestines, hoe-cakes (a cornmeal bread literally cooked on the blade of a garden hoe over an open fire) and the infamous "mess o' greens": usually collards, mustard and turnip tops, or other bitter greens, slow-cooked with a pork hock or trotter to create a flavourful sauce known as pot likker - succulent with the melted collagen from the pork bones and contributing to a mellowing of the acridity of the greens.  Many of the slaves were West African in origin and came from a culture that was well versed in making the most of a meager amount of food.  The ability to extract every nutritional ounce out of what food they were allowed, the spreading of a small amount of meat over a large dish, and the creative ways to make edible even the meanest of ingredients has resulted in the foundation for a rich, unique, and amazing food culture.

The evolution of soul food took a considerable turn when slaves became part of plantation kitchen staff, and access to better and more diverse ingredients became available.  With this change, the culinary contributions of the early African-Americans began to spread throughout other levels of society and gained an appreciative audience throughout the American south, where many of these dishes are now considered classics.

Of course, not all such dishes have evolved out of a situation as desperate and horrifying as slavery.  There are thousands of dishes that stem from the necessity of feeding a lot of people on a minimal budget, and there are always food tradespeople, from butchers to fishmongers to farmers, who learn to create delicious meals out of the items that they cannot sell.  Since the wealthy will always prefer the ingredients with the highest amount of prestige (and often the least amount of labour in preparation), there are plenty of things left behind for those who cannot afford the luxury.  Since the prestigious cuts of meat, fish, and commonest vegetables tend to require less effort and innovation to prepare - indeed, are often best enjoyed in a very simple preparation, it is up to the folks who have less to spend (or more to lose) and farther to stretch it to come up with dishes to utilize the unwanted elements.

Consider the Scottish haggis: heart and lungs of a young sheep, packed with oatmeal and spices into the sheep's stomach to create an unusual sort of sausage that - ideally - shows no signs of its provenance upon eating.  Scottish culture may be the very watchword in finding ways to squeeze every last bit of use out of a thing (culinary or not), and the haggis is a sort of princely evidence of this.  Sure, the lairds managed to eat haunch of venison and the chops and roast legs of the sheep, but there were an awful lot of hungry Scots who found good things to do with the less desirable parts of an animal.

The first bouillabaisse was not originally the high-end restaurant dish whose definition foodies fight over today.  It was a simple fish stew or soup made from the particular fish that the fisherman had no market for, and would feed instead to his family so not to cut into the profits of the day's catch.  These fish were generally the by-product of net-fishing and other techniques that were intended to harvest a particular, marketable species, but which always had a certain amount of by-catch that was not saleable.  As a fancy dish, now, it is made from a variety of exotic fish and shellfish that no working class fisherman in his right mind would dream of eating himself - they were much more valuable as a sale.

At various points in France's politically tumultuous past, there have been legal issues over the rights to hunt game by the lower classes - those who most needed to supplement a scant diet - which resulted in riots in the late 1700s and quickly changed laws to allow farmers at a minimum to trap the game that came into their crops and fields.  At this point in history, the use of the entire game animal - rabbit to deer - was paramount to survival, in a period when a combination of crop failure, crippling and unequal taxation, and an enraged peasant class.  What changes and concessions were made clearly were not enough to appease the masses. Starvation, a part of the political turmoil of the time, eventually led to the French revolution.

It seems that every culture has its definitive dish that is a one-shot way to use up a variety of nasty bits and pieces that have difficulty finding purpose in simpler preparations.  Mexico has its menudo, America has its spam and bologna - a disturbing sausage predicated on Italian sausage.  A whole variety of countries fry an exciting array of insects.  Headcheese.  If that didn't come out of a desperate sense of economy, I can't imagine what spawned it.  Bull testicles, which really does seem to be reaching above and beyond the call of duty in terms of using up the whole animal.

It is a peculiarity of human psychology that food trends can elevate a humble, simple, and delicious dish into culinary fashionability, whereupon it sheds much of its humble beginnings in a frenzy to replace difficult ingredients (too bony, too fatty, too time-consuming to cook) with the very cuts of meat or fish or exotic ingredients that were unavailable to the originators of the dish.  We then devolve into squabbling about the origins, about the true definitions, and regional ownership until we have an almost entirely different product than the one that was first elevated.  While it is comforting to see the gradual trend toward slow food because much of these classic, economical and socially responsible dishes do require a long cooking time.  Thus, the cassoulet gains in popularity: where it was previously scorned as time consuming, it is now praised for the sheer length of the start to finish cooking time.  Beans must be soaked, gamebird meat must be made into confit, and sausages (the granddaddy of places to hide the nasty, unappetising pieces of meat) must simmer until, at the three day culmination, a fragrant, steaming bowl of comfort.

October 2005