McLagan Jennifer - Odd bits: how to cook the rest of the animal

Just what do I mean by this strange title, Odd Bits? Most of the meat we eatthe tenderloins, the racks, the steaks, the legs, and the chopsis only a small percentage of the animal carcass. These prime cuts, once expensive and special, are now, thanks to industrialized farming, very cheap. Simple to cook, these familiar and common everyday cuts fill our butcher shops and supermarkets. What were once uncommon and prestigious pieces of meat have become banal and boring.

Well, Im not interested in these cuts and you wont find them here. This book is about the rest of the animal: the pieces we once enjoyed and relished but no longer bother with. Unfamiliar and odd, they have become the odd bits. I am not talking just about offal or variety meats. Yes, I am interested in the strange wobbly bits and theyre here, but alas these pieces are not the only animal cuts considered odd today. So, I chose this term because it is broader and more inclusive. Odd Bits covers everything from tongues to tails, cheeks to shanks, brains to bellies. They are all animal parts we have forgotten not only how to cook but also how to eat. This book, Odd Bits, is an introduction to cooking and eating the rest of the animal.

Today we are so removed from the sources of our food that we rarely think of meat coming from living, breathing animals. The steaks, chops, and ground meat we buy shrink-wrapped in the supermarket give no hint of the animals they came from, while an ear, a kidney, or a tail all remind us very tangibly that they were once parts of a living creature. These pieces of the animal now seem odd and strange to us, something we dont want to eat. But why is it stranger to eat a beef cheek than a cows back? Why do people chew a rib chop but recoil at roasted marrow bones? Why do we happily eat lamb chops but overlook lamb neck? And why do so many people know, without a doubt, that they hate brains? Should we care that these odd bits go unappreciated? Isnt there more than enough cheap meat for us to buy and eat?

As a percentage of our income, food is cheaper than it has been at any time in the pastespecially meat. We spend much less of our income on our food than our grandparents, and we spend less time sourcing it, cooking it, and eating it. The application of industrial principles and economies of scale to farming have lowered the cost of our food dramatically. (Still, while factory farming has reduced the cost of meat, it hasnt improved its quality or taste.)

However, dirt-cheap food is not sustainable and, in the long term, it can only be a blip on our culinary landscape. We are already rethinking our relationship to our food and recognizing that there are other costs incurred with this type of farming: polluted and infertile land, shrinking biodiversity, and, worst of all, wretched treatment of animals. Those of us who care about what we eatand we should all caremust demand that the animals we eat are raised naturally and humanely, treated with respect in both life and death. This is the only way a thinking carnivore can continue to eat meat.

Scared? Intimidated? Grossed out? Put off by memories of Mom, or some long ago lunch lady, coming at you with a slab of ineptly and indifferently fried liver, or by some comedians jokes about haggis? Does the phrase Eat IT! Its good for you! still strike fear into your heart?
ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Yes, the meat produced this way costs more, but that in turn has its benefits. By paying the true costs of production, we no longer rely on factory farms that pollute the countryside, the animals can be well cared for, and we will have better quality and better tasting meat. Paying more for our meat is good in other ways. If our meat costs more, we will not waste it, well take more care when we cook it, and we will eat less of ita good thing because most of us eat too much meat. My time in France has shown me that where meat is more expensive, portions are smaller and waste is less. I also see the way meat is handled and displayed therewith care and respect. More expensive meat forces us to look beyond those now familiar prime cuts for less popular and often cheaper cuts, the odd bitsit encourages us to cook and eat the whole animal. All these positive results come from keeping our side of the bargain we made when we domesticated animals: in exchange for their meat, eggs, and milk, we provide them with food, protection, and care.

Recently, in the world of professional cooking, there has been a renewed interest in odd bits. When it comes to food, often the impetus is top down: chefs discover new foods and new techniques, which then migrate into home kitchens. Fergus Henderson, the English chef-owner of St. John restaurant in London, has become a cult figure for his philosophy of nose to tail eating. This is good, and I love Ferguss cooking, but I am sure he would be the first to say that he is just making proper English food, cooking dishes that have a long history in Englands cuisine. My mother, whose roots are Scottish, cooked many similar dishes when I was youngnot with Ferguss skill, perhaps, but there is not much in his books that she doesnt recognize. Unfortunately, as with many new trends, this enthusiasm for odd bits can lead to excess and one-upmanship. Cooks compete to create the weirdest dishes that anyone would wantor more often not wantto eat. This doesnt help. It makes people already unfamiliar with odd bits think that they are difficult to cookthat only trained chefs know how to handle themand strange to eatsomething to be tried only in a restaurant. This is the reverse of true. At cooking school, chefs get very little exposure to odd bits, apart from the fashionable sweetbreads and calfs liver, and few of them understand the art of butchery and where on and in the animal a given odd bit is found. Most know less than my mother about cooking odd bitsand if she can cook them, so can you.

But where do you turn for advice in cooking odd bits? As odd bits have disappeared from our consciousness and our kitchens, so has our savoir-faire with them and our recipes for them. So in the following pages I hope to coax you into cooking odd bits by giving you some basic information and techniques. I want you to think beyond the familiar chops, steaks, and roasts when making dinner, and to realize there is a panoply of delicious, tasty morsels waiting for you to welcome them into your kitchen. At present, many are relegated to pet food: they all deserve a better fate. I am not trying to shock, although I am sure I will: my goal is simply to demystify the rest of the animal, to give you sound advice and to show you that cooking odd bits is really not that difficult.