By Kate Zimmerman
National Post
VANCOUVER -- Time was, in the English-speaking world, the idea of a high-end chef basing an entire meal on offal was a joke. These days, however, innards are as “in” as it gets with audacious foodies.
The London restaurant St. John, which spawned a cookbook called Nose to Tail Eating, has made gobbling guts fashionable among the world's savviest diners. Such aficionados as chef-writer-TV star Anthony Bourdain, who has said he wants the roasted bone marrow and parsley salad from St. John for his last meal, publicly sneer at the squeamish. To eat the whole animal is far more respectful than it is to cherry pick, he maintains, calling snout-to-pigtail pork-eating a “veritable magical mystery tour.”
Meanwhile, U.K. author Anissa Helou has this year come out with The Fifth Quarter: An Offal Cookbook, which draws on her Lebanese roots. Heart kebabs, stuffed spleen … for some folks, that's always been good eatin'. So what is our problem?
“We don't understand it, “ said Vancouver chef Don Letendre, of the Opus Hotel's swishy Elixir Restaurant. Letendre masterminded an all-offal dinner at Elixir Monday night and spoke to the Post a few days before.
“You go to France to a real brasserie and you'll see horsemeat and tripe and fried brains on toast and ravioli made with sweetbreads and spinal cord, and all these things,” the chef pointed out, but at Vancouver eateries, organ meats only get ordered if they're presented as specials.
If they're on the regular menu, Letendre said, “they tend to scare people away.”
About 30 people were expected at Elixir's “Gutsy Affair,” which also featured numerous fine wines and four charming winemakers from France's Rhone Valley. Only half the people who had reserved a spot showed up. Were the rest lily-livered, or just wooed more fervently by the unseasonably warm weather?
Hard to say. Letendre has read that 20 percent of North Americans eat innards. Asian cuisine, for one, is full of them. So is French; over aperitifs, the Rhone winemakers were happy to share their home recipes. In this country, though, eating offal is more of a chef-ly pursuit.
Letendre got to appreciate it growing up in the industry in Vancouver. Chefs, who learn to be practical early, would bring a whole carcass into the kitchen and proceed to use every last bit, to great effect.
“Innards are just as delicate and beautiful as the rest of the animal,” Letendre said. “It's not just the rib eye, the filet, the shoulder -- these cuts that we're used to having ….
“Sweetbreads are very tender, tofu-like. So is brain. They absorb the flavour of whatever you cook them with. That's what's nice about using those two parts of the animal. They're very smooth, velvety, almost like an eggplant.”
The North American discomfort with the idea of eating organs aside, it's that velvetiness that may put the health-conscious off. Organ meats are often rich. Brain has 100 percent fat content, Letendre said, which is fine as long as you don't eat it often.
As a treat, however, offal can be wonderful. That's the reason Letendre made it the culinary focus of Elixir's monthly wine dinner. To accompany the magnificent wines from the Rhone and please the Frenchmen discussing them, the chef produced astonishing morsels of beautifully wrought food. None of it looked like anything you once cut out of a frog in biology class.
The amuse bouche, called “Something With Legs,” was a rectangle of bone marrow as small as a child's thumb that was coated in flour, sautéed, and set on a pool of celeriac puree. “Get Ahead” consisted of tete de porc and veal sweetbreads (thymus glands), whipped into a small, delectably crusty cake.
“Tongue & Cheek” was poached ox tongue in a tortellini with mushrooms and herbs, served on grilled ox tongue, and veal cheeks braised with saffron, white wine, vegetables, cumin and fennel. Dessert, by an English chef de cuisine memorably named Julian Owen-Mold, was a drop-dead brilliant dark chocolate terrine with a core of salted foie gras.
The consensus among the guests who braved the dinner appeared to be that with offal like this, you can keep your panty-waist filet mignon.
Nazeem Kanani, a dentist of Indian descent who was born in Uganda, was blown away. But then, he said, when he was growing up, his family routinely ate variety meats like gizzards. “My mum used to make cow brain curry.”
Tim Shoveller had bought his wife, Jean the offal dinner for her birthday. She is a fan of the writing of M.F.K. Fisher, he explained, and she knew the Rhone wines would be “something special.” The fact that they'd be dining on innards didn't bother them a bit.
“With wine from Europe you're supposed to have typical dishes,” said Shoveller. “When you do it here (at Elixir), and when you pair it with wines from the region, I think it's a beautiful thing.”
“I'm just impressed to see this adventurous cuisine,” Lynn Henricsson volunteered. “Where else can you go to have cheeks, thymus, tongue, head, liver? It's just extraordinary to me.”
When offal is done right, “It's a new flavour and texture sensation,” she said. “The ox tongue was nothing like your grandmother ever had. It was sublime.”
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