Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Lickety Split

The other night we had some friends over to dinner, and the conversation turned to the subject of curious and funky meat products. Highlights included:
  • Scrapple
  • Head cheese.
  • Head cheese po-boys.
  • Tripe.
  • How bad tripe can be if you cooked it without a recipe and have no idea what you're doing.*
  • Hog maws.
  • Chitlins.
  • Spring lamb.
  • Matt's "born-with-all-its-flavor" theory.
  • Pigs feet.
  • The fact that pickled pigs feet aren't good when consumed straight from the jar.**
  • The recent trendiness of offal in haute cuisine.
  • Tongue.
When "tongue" came up, Mary described a certain clipping she had saved from her home town newspaper, which I begged her to pass it along to me. She has kindly obliged, and now I'm passing it along to you:



Isn't it beautiful? And what more persuasive argument could there be for the effectiveness of advertising in the Ville Platte Gazette? I'm serious. If you can sell 100 tongues*** you can probably sell any damn thing.

Thank you, Mary. Lickety split!

* I learned this the hard way.

** I also learned this the hard way.

*** I wonder what "Unclean Calf Tongues" are.

9 comments:

  1. What's funky about spring lamb? I ask.

    Then I remember learning, during my sojourn in Houston, that good lamb was much cheaper in the South than where I'd come from, because it was associated with, ahem, the wrong sort of eaters.

    There is a ghastly frozen New Zealand product that's all strings, but I'm talking Colorado and Nevada. It's great!

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  2. I certainly didn't mean to disparage spring lamb. It would fall under the heading "curious"

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  3. For that matter, I didn't mean to disparage any of them. I'm quite fond of many items on that list, even if some of them are decidedly funky.

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  4. I should have gone lickety split down to Paul's Meat Market. Tongue is actually quite good.

    On the subject of chitlins, do you rembember when you and Tom were still in New Haven(I had come back to Virginia) and he decided to cook some. After doing so they looked so bad he(and you) didn't want to eat them. So they were still in the frig when I came back three weeks later!!

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  5. Mmm. Three week old, bad chitlins. Delicious!

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  6. Anonymous7:31 PM

    Tongue well-prepared is delicious. But you have to "clean" them by (you might want to skip this -- it's gross) scraping the top in order to remove the top layer.

    I liked brains when I was a child. Then I found out what they were, and quit eating them.

    You think all that stuff is gross? What about the freshly shucked oysters -- they're still alive. I pointed that out to Billy, who is a very kind-hearted soul and who loves them. He thought a moment and said, "No. Oysters are plants". Hmph.

    Annou

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  7. I will reiterate. I think some of them are "curious" and some of them are "funky". In my lexicon neither of these terms are synonymous with "bad". Far from it.

    I haven't had particularly good experiences with tongue, but perhaps they weren't cleaned well. I do know that they still had their big ol' cow tastebuds all over them.

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  8. A very old gag:
    Matron to counterman: Tongue? I could never eat anything that came out of an animal's mouth.
    Counterman: Okay, lady; how about a fried-egg sandwich?

    ReplyDelete

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