Offal: A Global History by Nina Edwards

Author:Nina Edwards [Edwards, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2014-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Stephanie Diani, Offal Taste: Snood, 2009. These apparently formal portraits are subverted by their offal clothing, here with a medieval snood made from plaited intestine.

Stephanie Diani, Offal Taste: Tongue, 2009. The rawness of a beef tongue mohican plays with the idea of what should be inside being outside.

Norman Douglas’s book of aphrodisiac food, Venus in the Kitchen (1952), offers a variety of offal dishes, though he does not elaborate exactly how fried cow’s brains with herbs and spices, lamb’s ears with sorrel or macaroni with finely chopped kidneys are erotic in tone or physical effect. There is about the recipes a hesitancy between self-conscious naughtiness and snobbery. Douglas quotes Aristotle as recommending sparrow’s brains, propter nimium coitum, vix tertium annum elabuntur (on account of too much sex, they scarcely survive three years), and gives a recipe for lamb’s testicles with cinnamon, cloves and saffron from Bartolomeo Scappi, personal cook to Pope Pius V. There is implicit ribaldry concerning sexual parts, such as with ‘Pie of Bull’s Testicles’, again from Scappi, and he mentions vulvae sterils, a dish of sow’s parts from Apicius praised by Horace, Pliny and Martial.

Killing a pig, particularly when it has been reared as part of the family in rural communities, can be distressing. In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Jude is forced to make the kill himself when a professional pigsticker fails to turn up, goaded by his more callous wife, Arabella. Just as Julie Powell’s learning to butcher clarifies her feelings, so this slaughter exposes the incompatibilities in Jude and Arabella’s relationship, and Jude is emasculated. Arabella insists that he try to kill the pig slowly, for ‘every good butcher keeps un bleeding long’, but Jude in his distress knocks over a jug of fresh blood which she had intended for ‘blackpot’, a type of black pudding, and she despises him for it. Jude judges himself a ‘tender-hearted fool’: ‘Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done’ (my italics). Arabella is proud of being part of a rural tradition that wastes nothing, valuing every part of the pig. Yet she throws its penis, ‘the scrap of offal’, at Jude as a gross insult. The description of its ‘soft cold substance’ evokes an image of Jude as impotent.5

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