People squeamish at the idea of eating haggis get little comfort from Burns's description of what happens when the knife slices its intestinal skin and sends the minced offal spilling out: Trenching your gushing entrails bright, Like onie ditch; And then, O what a glorious sight, Warm-reekin, rich!
In Cape Town, South Africa, there's a factory using offal to churn out 100 tonnes of maggots a day.
They are acrobatic flyers and have mastered the move of stalling in midair, flapping their wings to remain almost stationary, while they pick a piece of bread -- or, when following fishing boats, a bit of offal -- out of the air.
In Italy they are more commonplace, but just as offal fell out of fashion in postwar Britain (it became synonymous with food for hard times), so chestnuts in Italy are maligned as the food of the poor.
They eat offal and brownies looking out on to Spitalfields Market, and try not to stare at Tracey Emin in the corner or Gilbert and George shuffling handsomely past.
It wasn't always thus: as Roux Jr points out, fish offal "was commonly enjoyed in the UK in medieval times, but seems to have gone out of fashion".
After getting a tour of the meat locker, we told Heimo and Edna that we were ready for the big leagues, so for dinner they brought out an offal platter of caribou kidney and liver and moose heart, pan-seared with some Thai noodles--call it Arctic/Bangkok fusion.
As a warning, the offal now slipping out of where your nether regions were minutes ago might mean you'll be forking out a cleaning charge for the next taxi you grab.
And yet: Chris Cosentino, the chef who, at his restaurant Incanto, helped pioneer the new offal in this country, has just come out with his first cookbook.
If I'm shelling out for finest offal in cold jelly, I want some bang for my buck.
For further studies, mass production of the nematode population was carried out, using chicken offal medium (Bedding 1984).
