A few years ago, I worked at a restaurant where the menu changed every day. For a long winter stretch, beef tartare became a staple. I hadn’t explored tartare much before this, but this dish was a revelation. We made it with hazelnuts and fried rosemary and sage and finished it with rendered guanciale. I had never heard of guanciale before this and I had also never experienced the profound boost of protein and decadence that this crazy dish provided me. There are few weirder phenomena then tasting a million beef tartares a night. One experiences a profound invincibility from all the beautiful meat straight to the system (red cheeks, a rush), only to realize how actually you’re very not invincible because all you’ve been eating, standing up and at a rapid pace, is raw meat.
That spring, we started a carpaccio dish that was quite popular. I recall how pretty it looked with purple chive flowers and also how I somehow always plated it wrong, mishandling the ripples that my chef had envisioned. Not sure how someone can really plate a flat raw meat wrong, but it was made clear to me that it was very possible to do so. Line cook vibes!
These dishes did well. Raw meat seemed at the time (and before the Spencer Pratt Heidi Montag antics) so to-the-point, direct with some strange elegance. An implied trust, and thereby respect, of a kitchen in ensuring safety in properly presenting what is deeply animalistic. This was around the era of a keto uptick and green juice moment, a real belief in the power of the raw.
Anyway, that was a few years ago. I am growing older! And I have been noticing something different.
There are restaurants who seem to be embracing a the production, moving from raw to… very cooked. Or, rather, very prepared. I’m talking about offal.
Offal is the name for internal organs of a butchered animal. Sweetbreads, haggis, heart, kidney, brains, tongue, gizzard, liver, caul fat, cheeks, head. Tripe is processed from the muscular lining of the stomach. It can be smooth or honey-combed, fresh or pickled or washed. Washed tripe is known as dressed tripe. Sweetbreads are the thymus glands of calves and mature beef. They need to be soaked, then blanched, then braised or cooled or breaded or fried.
While offal finds origins in most continents and by many different names, sweetbreads find their appellation from 16th Century England. It would be wrong and rude to say that very White Colonialist meat-based British foods are exclusively indicative of a national identity for a country in which I do not reside. But I can say that England is the place we can derive the term “sweetbreads”. From an English book The Historie of Man, the thymus gland is described as “the most pleasant… a sweete bread.” Bread used to be “broed”, which is what some animal flesh used to be called. So… voila! This is how many vegetarians order something they imagine as brioche and end up with a plate of innards.
Suddenly, I see offal everywhere. Lord’s, which opened to much fanfare last fall, serves a crispy pig’s head terrine, a braised tripe, a welsh rarebit, and a curried lamb scotch egg. Le Crocodile always has sweetbreads in stock, rotating and consistent. Around Rockefeller Center, constellating the Big Restaurant Rebrand, one is sure to find these meats; liver at Lodi and Jupiter, sweet breads broccolini polonaise at Le Rock.
Though a good tartare still energizes even the most exhausted city-dweller, why this movement towards profoundly prepared meats? It takes a specific type of dexterity to cook these foods, but also to eat them. I am okay saying that they are not for the faint of heart. They require a particular openness to texture and a capacity for unpleasant visual imagery. Why are they suddenly so many places, with fries?
The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
Is the book published in 2004 by Fergus Henderson, the chef and founder of St. John in England. When I was a line cook, St. John was the restaurant where everyone wanted to stage. (I remember a no-good line cook I once dated telling me that he wanted to run away and work at St. John together… too bad he didn’t show up for our stateside dates! Lol!)
Anyway, The Whole Beast is about how a person can make recipes that use the entire animal. It’s a very important book, with an ethos similar to those of American chefs like Alice Waters and Dan Barber. Sustainable and hyper-seasonal sourcing combined with high-calibur technique, all with the intention of extracting the most use out of the object of an ingredient, which tends to be an animal.
Henderson attaches his proclivity to butchering with the fact that his parents were both architects. With this, the book and philosophy holds an almost surgical methodology– a belief that with a clean and cunning hand, a person can construct a work of art.
There’s a terribly British line that a person hears a lot from Henderson and his disciples:
“If you’re going to kill the animal, it seems only polite to use the whole thing.”
St. John allows no mobile phones.
I ate there in September and everything was white, dream-like. Everyone working front was wearing some version of chef’s whites, matching everyone in back. So immaculate that it was hard to imagine animal blood anywhere on the premises.
There is St. John Smithfield and there is also St. John Bread and Wine, which was built initially to be a more useful outlet of the program’s bakery.
The Gospel of John tells us how Jesus fed the multitudes, using five loaves of bread and two fishes to feed five thousand people. As you might have heard, he also transformed water into wine. Lots of turning something into something else. Sublimation. John 6.32-35 recounts that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
As England shifts, her sweet meats have moved stateside. (The amount of Love Island I have consumed… lol.) Through the seasons, things are shifting fast. The monarchy, seemingly fatigued and heavily-questioned, with Diana and Harry and Meghan all trending and re-trending again. Everyone watched the first season of The Crown, then kind of petered off after Helena Bonham Carter did. Brexit has happened, making a need for distinction of the United Kingdom’s identity feel pressing, urgent.
I wonder if, to whatever extent, this trend of English preparations of offal are indicative of something similar. Is the export of a food tradition rendered more lucrative because of its potential to become obsolete? As the U.K. has had to zero in on the commodification of national identity (what will be imported and exported?), perhaps sweetbreads have become a prominent Good.
To cook whole animals, nose to tail, has always been a conscious effort that has a dual effect. The first is somewhat scientific, a movement against the current of hyper-modernity and hyper-industrialization, factory farming, manufactured foods, etc. The second is more social, and perhaps spiritual: a flexing of the dexterity that it takes to use a part of an animal that is kind of disgusting and process it into something extraordinary.
It seems that bread can become meat if we recognize the potential of its abundance. If internal organs can become the sweetest of breads, it seems, we have found some sense of wonder within what has lived and passed.
Woah, mind blowing and interesting opinion, thanks 🥂 As a brit who is also a fan of Fergus Henderson I can only speak of my own inclination towards offal meats. I personally champion nose to tail eating as it goes against more picky and wasteful culinary traditions. Food is fuel and animals are precious nutrition that should be respected. Who knows if that is part of my subconscious speaking my Britishness, who knows...perhaps my ancestors could tell me ✌️