Eddybles: A Food Blog - Mock Food, Offal and Art Culinaire

Mock Food, Offal and Art Culinaire

Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 06:28PM by

Faux Gras: Issue 90, Art Culinaire Magazine

Hunger makes beans taste like almonds. –Italian proverb

One of humanity’s most admirable characteristics is its ability to adapt to new situations. Evolution is born of adaptation and it is one of the most fundamental markers of progress. In the kitchen, the circumstances that inspire evolution are too often than not born of times of adversity, poverty, war, and oppression. While the dire predicaments that have plagued humanity throughout history might in themselves be horrifying, the results they have inspired in the kitchen frequently find their way into the culinary repertoire of a culture’s most beloved recipes.

Certainly there were recipes created during hard times that were abandoned the moment the situation improved, but it is not only the gems that bear remembering. In times of hardship, we can draw inspiration from the endless line of cooks, stretching back to the very beginning of our collective culinary history, who were resourceful enough to adapt to desperate times. Occasionally they fashioned something we would prefer to forget, but more often than not, what they produced was sublime, born of virtually nothing at all.

The recipes were occasionally twists on classic dishes that traditionally incorporated luxurious ingredients, but in times of trial they necessitated the use of more modest components. Other recipes to emerge during periods of crisis were not variations on the classics, but instead incorporated a more expansive use of an item. Pieces considered waste in more prosperous times became valuable fixtures at the table during periods of hardship. In the following, “Art Culinaire” examines what emerged when times of calamity forced humanity to get creative.

The ”Off-Fall” That is “Offal”

Offal, pronounced “â' full,” literally means to “off-fall", or fall off. In this context, the offal that chefs used were parts like kidneys, livers, hearts, brains, tongues, bone marrow, tails, spleens, sweetbreads, testicles, udders and feet of the animals that fall off during butchering. Throughout more prosperous times in history it was considered fashionable to discard offal as a waste product, but, rich in protein and other valuable nutrients, offal has always played a fundamental role in the diets of populations living in times of distress. From offal emerged some of humanity’s most beloved recipes that we continue to consume even after a situation improves. Today it seems that a new fine dining restaurant promoting its use of offal opens daily. Perhaps this is a reflection of the times of economic hardship we’re living in, or it might also be the result of enlightened chefs and diners who realize that discarding large portions of animals is a disgrace on a planet of over-taxed resources. Of course, offal’s rise in popularity might also speak directly to our stomachs: Once we vanquish the stigma attached to offal consumption, we quickly realize that it often tastes divine.

Offal has found its way into the worldwide culinary heritage of virtually every culture. An ancient British word for offal was “umbles,” which today makes an appearance in the expression “to eat humble pie.” Classic offal-based British recipes include “brawn,” also called “headcheese,” a jellied cold meat preparation originally prepared from the organs of wild boar. Another is “haslet,” essentially an offal meatloaf of the mid- and highlands of England. It traditionally consists of the heart and the kidneys of a pig. One of the most famous, “infamous,” according to some, offal-based British dishes, is “haggis,” a traditional dish of Scotland. The classic haggis recipe consists of the stomach of a sheep stuffed with minced liver, heart and lungs. Fat is added, along with oatmeal, stock, salt, pepper and seasonings, which in modern times often include nutmeg and cayenne pepper. Haggis was born from a need to preserve the organ meat that spoils quickly after butchering, but, when salted and stuffed into a stomach and boiled, will keep for an additional few weeks. The Scottish proudly declare haggis to be their national dish, but its origins most likely belong to the ancient Romans, the first culture known to have created recipes similar to haggis.

Offal use is also prevalent throughout the rest of world. In Europe, the Icelandic version of haggis is “slátur,” prepared in two versions: “blómör,” or blood pudding; and “lifrapylsa,” or liver pudding. In Greece, lamb spleen, liver, and small intestine are roasted over an open flame to create the dish “splinantero.” The traditional tripe soup in Bulgaria is called “Shkembe Chorba.” In Sicily, “pani ca meusa” is a sandwich consisting of caciocavallo cheese and beef spleen. “Pieds et paquets” is a traditional food in Marseilles, France, that consists of pig’s trotters and tripe.

In China, organ meat appears in countless recipes. One is “Wu Gen Chang Wang,” a fiery soup comprised of pork blood cubes, mustard, pork intestine slices and tofu. A popular dish in Sichuan province includes slices of pork tongue served with salt and sesame oil. A recipe discovered for “pork blood soup” prepared during the Northern Song Dynasty is over 1000 years old. “Snake blood wine” is served as a stimulant for energy and stamina, and includes the living heart from a freshly butchered snake.

In Singapore, a common street food is “pig’s organ soup,” and the Philippine dish “bopis” is pork heart and lungs sautéed in onions and tomatoes. The Indian recipe for “Kata-Kat” is a combination of spices, liver, kidneys and brains. Iranian “kebabs” sometimes consist of sheep kidneys, heart and liver, and meat pies in Australia are allowed to contain blood vessels, snouts, tongue roots and tendons without specific labeling identifying these ingredients.

In the Americas, a type of brochette is made from cow’s heart in Peru, and the Brazilian dish “churrasco” frequently includes chicken hearts that are roasted on a skewer over an open fire. In the southern United States, “chitterlings,” the small intestines of slaughtered pigs, make a frequent appearance, as do giblets heart, liver and gizzards - the lower stomachs of domesticated game birds and fowl. The neck is also sometimes included in this classification. “Scrapple,” a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe and popular breakfast item in the region, consists of pork scraps that frequently include offal products, along with cornmeal, pork broth and seasonings, combined to form a mush and then baked into loaves. The notorious “Rocky Mountain Oyster” is fried testicle from a boar, sheep or calf that is consumed in the Mid-western to the Western United States.

Mock the situation

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, "Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?"

"No," said Alice. "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is."

"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from," said the Queen.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, chapter 9

Offal recipes might be a classic example of what an imaginative populace invents in times of crisis, or as a means of resourcefulness, but there are countless other ways that humanity cleverly modified recipes to conform to the demands of the economy, religious observation, or a nation at war.

“Mock Turtle Soup” is a classic example of a dish created to replace a costly ingredient with a more affordable one. In this case, a calf’s head is substituted for the green turtle. At the soup’s inception, green turtles were expensive, but today they’re generally not used due to the turtle’s status as an endangered species. Lewis Carroll famously celebrated mock turtle as an amalgamation of several different animals in his classic work Alice in Wonderland. The recipe is nearly 200 years old, and while it may have gone out of favor in recent years, vestiges of it will exist forever in Carroll’s beloved story.
Similar to “Mock Turtle Soup," the Thai dish “Mock Shark Fin Soup” uses shitake mushrooms in place of expensive shark fin, replicating the fin’s sticky shark collagen with a combination of cassava starch and tapioca strings. The recipe for Mock Duck has two versions: one is a gluten-based vegetarian dish; and the other is formed from a lamb shoulder that is partially boned. The shank bone is then inverted up and outward before the leg is roasted and decorated to resemble a duck. A mock chicken leg is formed from ground veal that is put on a stick and shaped to resemble a chicken leg.

Religious observances also contributed to the origin of mock food. Strict dietary rules decreed by the Christian Church during the Middle Ages, for instance, necessitated followers to create recipes in compliance with a calendar that banned the consumption of meat on nearly half the days of the year. Religious leaders believed that eating animal flesh incited passion and lust, but that fish served to temper desire. The ban on all flesh but fish on days of religious observance had another benefit: It produced a citizenry of sailors that could be mobilized for exploration and military use. Over the centuries, countless inventive fish recipes were created to comply with religious standards. Even more ingenious were the recipes created during the period of Lent, when the consumption of all animal products, including dairy items, was banned.

The population turned to almonds as a substitute for dairy items, producing vast quantities of almond milk, butter and even almond cheese. A fifteenth century recipe for mock eggs found in the compilation of Medieval recipes Harleian MS 1430, instructs the cook to puncture each end of an egg with a pin, blow out the center of the egg, and then fill it with almond milk. A portion of the milk is colored yellow with saffron and cinnamon and placed at the center of the egg to mimic a yolk.

Christians were not alone in the creation of mock foods to comply with religious observances. The Jewish recipe for mock lobster salad complies with a ban on shellfish consumption by substituting a white fish, such as pollack or haddock for lobster, to resemble the flavor and the look of the original dish.

Periods of war have also inspired new recipes to mimic old favorites in compliance with rationing and food shortages. An American recipe for “mock apple pie” during World War II substitutes Ritz crackers for fruit. A British recipe for “mock marzipan” in the era of rationing, that lasted nearly a decade during and following World War II, used pulverized haricot beans in place of almonds. Named for Frederick Marquis, First Lord Woolton and Minister of Food in 1940, The “Woolton Pie” was invented at London’s Savoy Hotel as one of several recipes designed to help the British public maintain a nutritionally sound diet during an era of food shortages and rationing. The recipe was based upon the availability of seasonal produce. It included a thickener of rolled oats and green onion water added to a variety of diced vegetables that were topped with a cheese and potato crust, and served with brown gravy.

Rationing cookbooks flourished during times of war. A few of the notables include the World War One classic Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them, a collection of over 250 recipes, and Lydia E. Pinkham's War Time Cook & Health Book, published in 1912. Even the USDA promoted moderation and frugality. In 1943 it published 99 Ways to Share the Meat. Included in its pages of ideas on how to reduce meat consumption and live a more frugal lifestyle was the statement “Anyway you figure it, there isn’t enough meat to satisfy all appetites during wartime.” Those supplies are less than in peace years. Our meat production now is greater than at any time in history. Working day and night, American farmers, ranchers, packers and processors are pushing meat production goals higher. It takes time, though, to produce meat . . . longer to “build” a good beef steer than to build a destroyer.”

Just for fun

It’s more useful to have knowledge about cuts of meat than a lot of money. –Jacques Pepin

Not all mock food was motivated by periods of shortages, economic hardship or war. Ancient Romans found great humor in food fakery and substituted one food for another simply as a way to amuse themselves. Romans found deception tremendously entertaining, and elevated the game of food trickery to a high art. In his satire Satyricon, the Roman writer Petronius documents a banquet at the home of a man named Trimalchio, where an entire meal was comprised of pork disguised as other foods. Since the story was written by a satirist, it is a bit dubious, but it reflects the ancient Roman trend of serving food that was something else all together.

It was not just Roman humorists who documented the Roman love of food deception. Even Apicius, one of the most famous gourmands in history, wrote recipes with trickery in mind. In one he describes how rose wine could be made without roses with the aid of lemon leaves and honey. In a recipe entitled “Patina de Apua sine Apua” (“Anchovy Omelette without Anchovies”), he substitutes jellyfish for anchovies, and closes his recipe with the sentence “And no one at table will know what he’s eating.”

The art of food deception was still thriving centuries later in Medieval England. The 14th century cookbook Forme of Cury, the most extensive compilation of recipes written in English from this period, claims to be penned by the Master Cooks of Richard II. It includes a recipe for ”Golden Apples” that were actually meatballs made with forced ground meat shaped into apple forms, then ”gilded” with a wash of egg and saffron or ground parsley, depending upon whether red or green apples were desired.

Ancient Romans might have been one of the first cultures to participate in food deception, but they were certainly not the last. Nearly every culture and every era has played this game. Whether it was out of necessity during times of war, food shortages or economic crises, or inspired by religious doctrines, or even to encourage humor, recipes developed to mimic something else are sprinkled throughout the history of documented culinary time. Not only do hard times inspire creative substitutions, they also remind us, as is the case with offal, that every part of an animal is valuable. Unfamiliar cuts of meat might initially suffer our rejection, but more often than not, the only things they require to make them shine is our acceptance and a bit of inspired cooking. Cultures have made do with what is available to them on a limited budget or in times of crisis for millennia. Instead of feeling disenchanted by the food that a particular situation affords, we can choose to be inspired by the innovative recipes born of hard times. Or we can do it just for laughs.

...The perfect lover is one who turns into pizza at 4am. Charles Pierce