Posted on 11/20/2008 10:10:13 PM PST by bruinbirdman
I love liver. chicken and especially beef. Especially with sauteed onions. it has to be a little sweet.
Had chopped liver for dinner. Yum!
For some reason my father was always talking about something called “tripe à la mode de Caen”. He had a lot of experience eating French food, but I’m not sure if it was something he liked or if he was just joking about it.
Is offal french for awful?
**gags**
I used to like something called “spaghetti Caruso” that was sometimes on the menu at Italian restaurants - spaghetti with chicken livers. It was really good but I can’t image eating it now or preparing it at home. I think it might have been named after the opera singer.
In the US it is generally referred to as organ meats. Also certain cuts of muscle not usually consumed as individual dishes (tongue, [ox]tail)
They banned bone marrow in France after Mad Cow, but all you had to do is ask the butcher for some and he’d bring it out from the meat locker wrapped up. Like they really expected us to live without our Risotto alla Milanese. Jeez!
I don’t like beef tongue; however, sweetbreads and ox tails are great.
As a kid I remember eating fried chicken livers once a week or so. I liked them. Haven’t had them in decades, though.
I do like homemade sausage...as long as I don’t know what’s in it, LOL!
Boiled or fried...
In some very expensive restaurants, the veal, which I ordered medium rare, came with braised ox tail to give a depth of flavor to the veal. It was wonderful.
I grew up with pickled tongue and liver and occasionally, when my grandmother was still alive, we had a stew made with heart and lungs. And of course, chopped chicken liver or pan fried chicken livers with marinara sauce over spaghetti. No complaints. It is all very good food.
I was in a French restaurant, and it was the dish of the day, and the odour was very ...pungent. It is made with either a pig or a lamb colon. I do not know HOW they eat it.
French andouillette, on the other hand, is an acquired taste and can be an interesting challenge even for adventurous eaters who don’t object to the taste or aroma of feces. It is sometimes eaten cold, as in picnic baskets. Served cold and sliced thinly, the smell, taste, and texture may be mistaken for an andouille [a milder, less stinky sausage], but on closer inspection the texture is considerably more rubbery and the meat has a more feces-like flavor. By contrast, many French eateries serve andouillette as a hot dish, and foreigners have been repulsed by the aroma, to the point where they find it inedible (see external links). While hot andouillette smells of feces, food safety requires that all such matter is removed from the meat before cooking. Feces-like aroma can be attributed to the common use of the pig’s colon (chitterlings) in this sausage, and stems from the same compounds that give feces some of its odors.
As you say - not so nice.
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