Offal

Jonathan Ray
The Spectator

For some reason - such as sheer bloody-mindedness - a few days after his
75th birthday my father announced that he could keep up the charade no
longer and was coming out as a vegetarian. He did add, however, that his
particular wing of vegetarianism regarded oxtail and oysters as honorary
vegetables. A few weeks later he widened this dispensation to include
pig's trotters, especially those in jelly. It always seemed rather a
capricious diet to me - offal or tofu. In any case it proved too much
for my mother, who skilfully put an end to any further septuagenarian
silliness by serving him a dish of baked turnip stuffed with semolina.

I thought of him the other week in France, when I spotted tripe à la
mode on a menu. Sadly, on ordering, I was told by a doleful waiter,
'Alas, monsieur, we are a little low in the tripes today.' At least in
France it isn't a rarity to see offal on a menu or indeed in the
supermarkets, whereas in these days of sanitised pre-packaged meat it is
virtually impossible to find decent offal in England. Even chickens
don't come with their giblets any more.

Since sampling his sublime homemade sausages I've been cultivating our
local butcher, and I got terribly excited when I saw a tray of pig's
trotters in his window. I bought four - at 30p each - although I wasn't
quite sure what I was going to do with them. My wife finally agreed to
pop them into some cassoulet she had spent the best part of a week
preparing, but confessed to finding them rather grim to handle. And this
from a girl whose mum boils pigs' heads for brawn!

Apart from at my in-laws, I have yet to find a better place for offal
than the Smithfield restaurant St John, co-owned by the guru of
nose-to-tail eating, Fergus Henderson, whom I joined for lunch last
week. I suppose that a throbbing hangover is not the most sensible of
conditions in which to approach a meal consisting of extreme examples of
offal - a word which refers to the organs and extremities of a beast -
and I did rather regret my kümmel-swilling of the previous night. The
sight of two dead sucking pigs in the open kitchen, lying pale and waxy
on the slab, their stomachs slit open ready to receive a serious
stuffing, did stop me briefly in my tracks, as did Fergus's whispered
promise, 'We have rather a nice bit of pig's spleen up our sleeve for
the first course.'

A glass of Ruinart, combined with Fergus's infectious enthusiasm for all
things offal, helped me to get a grip as I studied the menu and I
suddenly realised that I was remarkably hungry. Having had no problem
deciding on my main course, I allowed myself to be goaded by Fergus into
splitting three starters with him. First up was a plate of St John's
signature dish, roast bone marrow and parsley salad. Taken from the
middle leg of a calf, these were five or six inches of bone, within the
tube of which nestled some deliciously jelly-like marrow. I can assure
you that there is no more pleasurable or efficient a hangover cure than
a piece of warm, creamy and unctuous marrow, freshly scooped from the
bone, spread on wholemeal toast and sprinkled lightly with rock salt and
plenty of flat-leaf parsley. Until I ate it I hadn't realised that this
is what I had been craving all morning. 'Ah, yes,' agreed Fergus, when I
admitted to my parlous state, confident that I was now on the mend.
'Bone marrow does indeed have a remarkably steadying and uplifting
quality.'

A tasty confit of pig's tongue in duck fat served with shredded celeriac
followed, after which I was invited to tuck into an elegant 'Swiss roll'
of spleen, bacon and sage, accompanied by chopped gherkins, red onion
and red-wine vinegar. 'I can't understand why more people don't eat
spleen,' said Fergus. 'It's a beautifully behaved organ and cruelly
overlooked. Nobody minds eating liver, which filters heaven-knows-what
in the body, but they always ignore the spleen.'

The main course of pigeon and pig's trotter pie is one of those dishes
that sad people like me dream about when we should be having healthy and
invigorating dreams about Claudia Schiffer. I had three helpings of it,
with just enough buttered cabbage to keep scurvy at bay. Set under a
crisp brown lid of fresh suet, the pigeon breasts - notorious for being
dry - had been kept astonishingly moist thanks to what Fergus calls
'trotter gear'. The secret, he told me, is to braise some trotters in
madeira, chicken stock and vegetables until the flesh falls off the
bone, after which it will set into a gloopily meaty jelly as it cools.
This jelly, Fergus assured me, is one of the great gastronomic tools.
Meats prone to drying out, such as pigeon and venison, are invariably
improved from being cooked in it, and it is an obligatory ingredient in
coq au vin in the Henderson household.

I swear that Fergus became quite misty-eyed as he spoke of his love of
offal. 'Chicken necks make great snacks, as does sliced ox heart and
chips,' he said. 'And there's nothing of a pig that you can't use.
Indeed, it seems so rude to the animal not to eat every bit of it, be it
the tongue, heart, stomach, spleen, chitterlings, kidneys, snout, ears,
trotters or tail.'

I told him that he was making me nostalgic for that great English
delicacy, the Bath chap - a breadcrumbed piece of fatty pig's cheek
combined with a sliver of tongue - which I had barely seen since my
childhood. 'You should have said!' exclaimed Fergus. 'We've got Bath
chap on the menu at St John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields.' A hurried
phone call to his other establishment confirmed that there was one Bath
chap left, whereupon I was hustled out of the restaurant and into a cab.
What finer reason to dash across town than in quest of a Bath chap?

As we sped through the City, we reminisced about our favourite dishes
and memorable meals with the same hushed reverence used by
fortysomething soccer nerds to discuss FA Cup-winning teams of the
1970s. I recalled some wild boar that I had eaten in France as a
youngster, on which occasion the chef, tickled by my delighted
enjoyment, had presented me solemnly with the animal's tusks, while
Fergus eulogised about a birthday breakfast of devilled kidneys and
black velvet that he had once had in Scotland.

It was a crushing blow to discover that some rotter had nabbed my Bath
chap from behind the waiter's back just as he was confirming its
existence on the phone, and Fergus looked utterly bereft on my behalf.
'Never mind,' he consoled me, 'you must come back again and I'll make
sure that the finest of all Bath chaps awaits you. Done well, when the
cheek has done enough exercise and the fat's all creamy and the tongue
is tender, a Bath chap is like the oyster of a bird, a real hidden
treasure.'

And when, I'd like to know, did you last hear someone extol a lentil in
such terms?