My culinary education in offal was quick and immersive: I took a job as a line cook at Holeman & Finch, a restaurant that offered marrow, brains, liver, sweetbreads, heart, and testicles. Atlanta’s chefs were thoroughly in the grips of a farm-to-table upswing, and intent on pushing the ethos to its natural extremes–owning their own farms, or at least striking buying agreements with farmers in advance of a season, and preserving everything they could get their hands on. WHOLE whole animal cooking was a natural extension for the city’s culinary intelligentsia.
I’d had the occasional beef liver that my mom insisted was country-fried steak, but my exposure to organ meats ended there. Within a couple of weeks, I could competently cook just about any organ I could easily buy, and within 6 months I’d strategized with other chefs on how to get and use the hard-or impossible-to buy in America: blood, lungs, spleen. It wasn’t just novelty or challenge that made this food exciting–muscle meat is pretty homogenous, but organs can be creamy, dense, springy–even the muscular organs like tongue and heart bear little resemblance to a steak or pot roast. As a young cook, variety excited me–I was pulled to the wide variety of vegetables for the same reason.
The market has since contracted mightily: Abbatoir, the other parts-centric restaurant in Atlanta, closed in 2015, and H&F has trimmed its organ offerings down to chicken liver pate, brains and marrow. Americans prefer-not wrongly–more vegetables in their diets, even when eating out.
Of course, what happens in restaurants is not the full story of what happens on our plates, and while the professional kitchens in my corner of the world aren’t offering as many organs in acclaimed dining rooms, small farms’ expansion into online ordering means that they can more easily find a ready market for their parts. This is a wonderful thing: farmers are selling more of the animals that they put significant care and money into, and consumers can source the food they want to cook, raised sustainably, and brought to them conveniently.
Every Monday, I’ll post about an offal preparation. For now, basic preparation guidelines can be found in each category–look for pictures and more categories to be added as I progress. Thank you for reading.
