I love Jason Brechin’s recent write-up of offal as “the magical ‘fifth-quarter’ of the animal.” Offal is what literally “falls-off” or falls out during processing at the slaughterhouse, and so mainly refers to everything from the central body cavity: stomach, intestines, spleen, liver, heart, lungs, kidneys, but also include sweetbreads (the thymus gland), brains, tongues, as well as all the extremities such as trotters, tails, and ears – basically all the bits we’re too squeamish or uppity to mess with anymore.  But limiting ourselves to steaks and chops from the loin – living “high on the hog” so to speak – we’re missing out on a whole, wide world of different flavors and textures, not to mention that these pieces can often be had free for the asking.

Since both my parents were English, I was exposed to offal growing up – steak and kidney pie, fried liver and onions, fried lamb’s kidneys – but the unimaginative way they were prepared did not endear me to them.  Lamb’s kidneys simply chucked in a pan and fried until done all the way through come out tasting rubbery and, well, exactly what I imagine lamb’s piss tastes like.  My brother actually liked fried liver and onions enough to request it for his birthday meal, but, being the younger, I was always secretly convinced that he only requested this dish in order to watch me gag on it.

But having got the great gift of Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating a few years back and having had the chance to dine on roasted bone marrow salad and grilled ox heart at his restaurant St. John last year, I’ve been expanding my horizons and giving offal a second chance.  Buying a whole pig and wanting to make the most of her gave me the opportunity to plunge in and try my hand at some offal creations.

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I first encountered the wonderful, offbeat work of Jillian Nickell at January’s Pecha Kucha, where we were both presenters.  The animals she draws immediately reminded me of classic children’s illustrators from a hundred years’ ago, like Leslie Brookes and Johnny Crow, and by the time her 6 minutes and 40 seconds were up, I realized that she would be the perfect artist to illustrate This Little Piggy.  This Little Piggy steps out of the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, and I always imagined was either the one who “went to market” or the one who “had roast beef for his dinner.”  All this classic character needed was a little ‘tude to go with the food.  Jillian’s drawings have a whimsical quality, bordering on the absurd sometimes, so she immediately took to the concept of a peg-legged, pirate pig, bringing home the bacon (while showing plenty of ham bone).

I could go on at great length about the motto on the flag, “Charcuterie et mon droit,” which is a parody of the motto of the English monarch.  Let’s just say that it asserts both a right to charcuterie and a willingness to defend it if necessary (first and foremost, with humor!).

Now is your chance to fly the pirate flag and show your colors when it comes to local foods!  Jillian will make a limited edition of this poster (she silk screens them herself in her basement), and I plan on ordering t-shirts and canvas tote bags as well, if enough orders come in.  You’ll find all these items listed in the Club section of the website, and I love the idea of adding a local artist to the local food artisans already listed.  Personally, I love Jillian’s design so much that I’m sorely tempted to get a tattoo of her rendition of my totem animal, but my spouse would never stop gagging, so I’ll have to settle for a poster as well.

A good friend of mine who’s a social worker has been hankering after a poster she saw in a head shop months ago.  It showed a goofy white kid with the caption “Got a little gansta in you?”  Now is your chance to answer the question, “Got a little pirate pig in you?”

While dabbling with the blood of sacrifice, don’t think I haven’t been feasting as well!

I’ve wanted to make blood sausage ever since I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, “It Takes a Village to Kill a Pig,” where he places boudin noir in his pantheon of “the hundred greatest foods of the world” (de-throning the frozen Milky Way bar!).  I had a chance to eat some last spring, when I was in London and came across a shop selling charcuterie from organic, English meats.  It was ghastly – mealy in texture, with no redeeming flavor.  To get a good boudin, it seemed, I was going to have to make it myself.

Which is not as easy as you might think.  Although it is legal to sell pig’s blood in the US, the slaughterhouse has to have special equipment and has to be specially certified, which almost nobody bothers to do.  As a result, about the only place you can find pig’s blood is at an Asian market, where it will be frozen.  But I wanted fresh blood.  Following the centuries-old tradition of French farmhouses (which you can also find beautifully documented in the opening pages of Stéphane Reynaud’s cookbook, Pork & Sons), I wanted to make boudin on the same day that the pig was slaughtered and encase it in the pig’s own intestines.

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“‘Of all that is written, I love only that which one writes with one’s own blood.  Write with blood, and you will discover that blood is spirit.  It is not at all easy to understand the blood of another…  Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, but rather to be learned by heart.’”
–Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On Reading and Writing”

Thoughts on Sunday morning: What’s the connection between blood and the word?  When we speak of blood or write about blood, is that the same thing as writing in blood?  And how are we to interpret such “blood-signs”?  Are they poison, “heart’s delusion,” or, on the contrary, heart’s balm, worthy “to be learned by heart”?  What might that mean: to learn by heart?

Speaking of blood, speaking of speaking of blood, let’s begin at the beginning, which is to say near the bitter end, with the Last Supper: “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus the same night in which be was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.  After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians XI, 23-25, King James version).

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The very first blog entry I wrote, sixteen months ago now, was about Chad Ward’s great little book on kitchen knives, and featured a handmade knife by Thomas Haslinger.  After having this knife for a year, all I’ve got to say is: it was freaky sharp when I got it, I’ve been using it day after day, for everything from cutting winter squash in half to boning out whole shoulders of pork, I have not sharpened it once, and it’s still almost as sharp as the day I got it.  Sure, I touch the edge to a “sharpening steel” (which is neither steel nor for sharpening) regularly, but the edge has not needed regrinding.  Maybe this summer.  Oh, and the knife is as beautiful to look at as it is to wield.

A handmade knife is a big investment, so I understand that it better pay off.  Even if you’re only working with a knife for fifteen minutes a day, that works out to 90 hours per year or 4500 hours over a lifetime.  Do you really want to spend that much time fighting a blunt instrument that won’t cut right, won’t cut straight, that you have to clutch in a death grip to force it to do what you want?  Imagine all those hours transformed into a pleasure, a joy, moments of pride when you got to exercise a skill in the kitchen, and at the end of a lifetime of use, you’ll still have a knife to pass on to someone else.

My knives are made from S30V steel, developed by Crucible Specialty Metals, using their proprietary Crucible Particle Metallurgy process.  They start by shooting molten metal through a high pressure nozzle in order to atomize it into a very fine powder, which is then screened and sealed into steel containers which are are hot isostatically pressed at temperatures approximately the same as those used for forging.  The resulting steel has an extremely fine and homogeneous microstructure, with a uniform distribution of carbides, all of which translate into a very tough knife that takes an extremely sharp edge.  In addition to a new steel from CSM (154), Thomas Haslinger is also making chef’s knives with a new Sandvik steel, 13C26, primarly used for razor blades and surgical knives, which he says takes a “wicked” edge.

If you missed my abliguritive presentation last month at the Champaign Urbana Design Organization’s second Pecha Kucha, or if you just feel up for another licking, now you can watch the video!  Many thanks to Nick Mann, a great local photographer (and fellow bike rider), who was the videographer and a fellow presenter at the event, speaking about the book on The Elements he did with Theo Grey.  Many thanks also to Jay, who spent long hours banging his head against a wall, in order to make WordPress video-friendly.

If you haven’t already, mark your calendars for Friday, April 16, when the next Pecha Kucha is scheduled!  (In the meantime, all the Canopy Club’s bouncers have been sent to re-education camp, where they are getting sensitivity training, so they should be more accomodating next time!)

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If you don’t want to know the name of the pig that I’ll be making into pâté, pulled pork, and prosciutto, of a pig that could pass into your hands in the next year and cross the liminal boundary of your lips, becoming one flesh with your flesh, then stop reading now.  Names and photographs (as the Amish know) are powerful things, and seeing them, reading them, listening to them reverberate silently in our ears – taking them in through the eyes and the ears and keeping them in memory – are all proleptic and anticipate that moment of sacrifice and consumption.

And, by and large, we prefer to eat with our eyes closed or at least averted.  We eat meat, spear it on our forks, but keep ourselves at arm’s length from it, translating even the names of the animals as we transform them into food: pig into pork, sheep into lamb, cow into beef, chicken into McNuggets.  In general, we don’t even want to remember that meat came from an animal, let alone that animal there, the one in the picture, who even has a name, perhaps.  It’s as if we dis-member the animal, break it down into unrecognizable parts, laid out on styrofoam trays at the supermarket or speared on the end of our fork, precisely in order to keep ourselves from thinking about or re-membering the living being they come from.  There are exceptions – hunters, butchers – who look the flesh they eat in the eye first, but anyone with blood on their hands is likely to find themselves ostracized or even demonized by the majority.

And, for all my desire to know where my food comes from, to have a hand in it, to analyze (over-analyze you might be tempted to say) and be aware of the sacrifice involved in it, I am not exempt from this general rule, this blindness.  After all, the eye that never blinks also goes blind.

Although I can tell you the provenance of every scrap of meat I use, I do not know the names of the animals, I did not look them in the eye, I did not have a hand in their slaughter.  Until yesterday.

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Although only just listed in the Club section, I made this finocchiona salame back in November.  Since then, it’s been slowly fermenting and drying.  I donated some to Dan Schreiber’s tasting of 1000-year-old foods a couple weeks ago, and people ate it up and clamored for more, so it must be ready!  I loved Armandino Batali’s finocchiona, which we used to get at Persimmon, so when that was no longer available, I had to make my own.  Made with Triple S Farm’s pork, it’s simply seasoned, with salt, white pepper, black pepper, and just a little garlic and chianti.

And, of course, fennel.  I used to think fennel was fennel, until I tried the “wild mountains fennel” that Scott sells, imported from Italy.  These seeds are small and intensely licorish-y, but while conventional fennel has a caustic bite that gets you in the back of the throat, these have a mild, toasted nuttiness that makes them a perfect partner for meat.

And, thanks to the generosity of others!, I finally have some venison to work with again.  First, I combined some with more of Stan’s pork to make these venison bratwursts.  Mildly seasoned with white pepper, coriander, a hint of garlic, and a splash of white wine, then hot-smoked until fully cooked, this is a versatile sausage, like a Polish kielbasa.  You could grill it and eat it as is, but this time of year, I enjoy it mixed in with a heartier dish.  I took the broth I had left over from steaming pastrami and cooked a huge pan of cabbage, onions, carrots, and potatoes that I served with slices of the bratwurst.

It’s hard to know what to call my other venison sausage.  It’s loosely based on a sausage that’s considered the national sausage of Switzerland, where it’s called Cervelat in the German-speaking part (cervelas in French and zervelada or cervelato in Italian).  Switzerland produces 160 million of them a year, which works out to just over 20 sausages per person.

Originally made with pork brains (the name comes from the Latin cerebrum), it’s now made with a mixture of beef and pork, and sometimes bacon.  The recipe I have makes a firm, lean salame, like what we call a Summer Sausage, and so I substituted venison for most of the beef.  Studded with whole peppercorns and mustard seeds, fermented, and then smoked for the better part of a day over hickory, this is a dense, meaty, and flavorful sausage.  It’s fully cooked, so just eat it out of hand, as I’ve been doing!

Now I have to clear the decks and prepare for a 400-pound sow who’s coming this weekend (and I don’t mean any relatives)!

When I recently got some of Coluccio’s canned San Marzano tomatoes from Scott’s Sausage Debauchery Store, I decided that I should put them to a test and organize a tomato taste off.  For this rigorous test, I waited for the perfect occasion (namely, the next time I needed a can of tomatoes), and then I scientifically proceeded to open all four cans in my pantry and taste them.

Although I long ago concluded that Scott must be a brutha from anutha mutha, we’re just as likely to give each other shit as a handout.  So, without any favoritism (drumroll, please!), here are the results from last night’s taste test:

The hands-down loser was Full Circle organic Crushed Tomatoes.  Full Circle is the organic line of products for Schnuck’s Supermarkets, based in St. Louis, and we have a couple in the area.  Upon opening the can, what greets you is the nasty, dark, reddish-brown color of oxidized tomatoes.  This mush had little flavor, and none of it was fresh.  Blech!  This brand give the lie to the general rule that fruits raised organically will be sweeter and have better flavor.

Muir Glen organic used to my favorite brand of canned tomatoes.  I discovered them long before Cook’s Illustrated proclaimed them the best.  After that, they were quickly bought up by a big food conglomerate.  Whatever the reason, the thrill is gone.  Open a can now, and, despite the citric acid added, you see the same brownish-red color of oxidised tomatoes.  Without any added sugar, their tomatoes still had a good amount of sweetness, but the flavor was tired, wan, reminiscent of Campbell’s tomato soup.

First place was a tie between Coluccio’s and Bella Terra, and, not surprisingly, both cans contain tomatoes from San Marzano, which remains the gold standard, in my book, for tomato sauce.

Bella Terra is the organic line of the big Italian food company Racconto.  Although their tomatoes are canned without any citric acid or calcium chloride, the color was a bright, fresh red, and the tomatoes had a good, sweet flavor.  Interestling, they claim on the label that their tomatoes come from the “San Marzano region,” but the can doesn’t carry any D.O.P. guarantee of their authenticity, so there might be less here than meets the eye.

In contrast, Coluccio’s can comes festooned with seals to guarantee that its tomatoes come only from the San Marzano region of Italy.  In comparison to Bella Terra, I would say the flavor was a little more austere, a little less sweet, mild, and easy-pleasy.  Maybe it was just the hint of citric acid and salt that gave it a little more bite, but I would say this had a “classic” taste.

That was the terse comment of another underground food maker, who emailed me the link to this post on the Chicago Tribune’s food blog, entitled “Health Department destroys thousands of dollars of local fruit.”

The author of this excellent post, Monica Eng, happened to be on hand for the Health Department inspection because of a story she is writing “on how well the city is adapting to Chicago’s evolving culinary scene full of niche caterers, small batch food artisans, specialty pastry chefs and supperclubs.”  As she notes, “Many of these businesses are in the incubation stage and rely on rented kitchen space in communal kitchens.”

Based on what she saw and recorded last Thursday night, the response of the authorities seems to be to do what they can to kill such small businesses in the womb, as the Health inspectors seized one business’s inventory of frozen fruit purées (all made from fruit purchased from Green City Market farmers), slashed the bags open, dumped them in a trash can, and poured bleach on them to ensure no one could eat them.

What was so wrong with this food?  Was it unsafe to eat?  The Health Inspectors had absolutely no reason to suspect that.  In fact, all the fruit purées had been prepared in this communal kitchen, which is certified by the Health Department, and prepared by the owner of this small business, Flora Lazar, who is certified by the state of Illinois as a food sanitation manager.  So what warranted such drastic action?

The problem was that she had prepared all this food while she spent months wrestling with the city bureaucracy to issue her a business license.  Because the city had already issued a license to the owner of the communal kitchen, she was repeatedly told that she could not be licensed to operate a business at the same address (even though this is directly contrary to the stated policy of the Department of Business Affairs).  Trying to do everything by the book, Lazar persisted, enlisted the help of her city Alderwoman, finally got permission to apply for a separate license, paid her $600 fee, and scheduled the inspection by the Health Department as the final step in the arduous process of getting approved to operate her business. Because all this fruit had been prepared before she had the piece of paper licensing her to do so, it had to go.

But it wasn’t enough just to ban this fruit from the kitchen.  When Flora was told that all this fruit (puréed without a license!) could not be used in the food prepared by her business, she tried to give it to her son to take home for their private use at least.  The response of the Health inspectors was to call the cops to forcibly take back the fruit from him so that they could destroy it. When the food makers pleaded with inspectors to donate the food to the Greater Chicago Food Depository instead of just wasting it, their request was denied.  (Get real!  We can’t have people in hunger eating safe food, prepared by someone to whom we gave the runaround instead of a license!)  Finally, as Flora’s son Harry lays out in the Comments section, they put the Health inspector in direct contact with Flora’s Alderwoman, who “was frantically trying to reach the city health commissioner” to see if a less drastic resolution could be reached.  Since the inspectors were planning to revisit the kitchen anyway, they all pleaded with them to leave the food in the freezer and not to do anything irreversible until these appeals and other options had been considered.  The response of the inspector in charge was that he must destroy the food immediately.

Now that Flora’s had her “inspection,” she can probably get her license and go into business, except that – oh, right – the process of getting approval resulted in the destruction of her entire inventory of “irreplaceable” local fruits, worth more than $6000.  As “a despondent Lazar” is quoted as saying, “This puts me out of business for six months.”  As Monica Eng points out, if Flora had simply kept this food out of the kitchen until after the inspection, no one would have been the wiser.  But because she was open about what she had done and tried to play by everyone’s rules, she now finds herself completely screwed.  Welcome to the “the city that works!”

As if all this weren’t enough, the owner of the communal kitchen was recently told by a representative of the Department of Business Affairs that any violation by one business using the kitchen would result in fines for everyone using the facility.  As the owner said, “That’s like giving everyone in the car their own ticket when a driver is stopped by the police.”  Such a ruling – that sharing a kitchen entails shared liability – if it holds up, would probably be enough to kill the whole communal kitchen enterprise.  Who’s going to shell out money to rent space in a kitchen, if they can be fined for the practices of people they don’t even interact with or if they might suddenly find all their food confiscated and destroyed because of what someone else has done?  And if communal kitchens are put out of business by such action, then micro- or nano-businesses like Flora’s, trying to use local foods, will either never start up or will be forced underground.

As quiet and undramatic as this video footage is, it captures nothing less than a holocaust of local food.