Serious Eats: Recipes
The Nasty Bits: Lamb's Neck Stew
Note: Our intern Chichi Wang loves offal so much, she pitched us this series called The Nasty Bits, where she'll explore recipes involving animal innards on a regular basis. Her goal is to tempt Serious Eaters out of their safety zones and into the wonderful world of offal. Take it away, Chichi!
Throughout history, cuisines around the world have championed animals in all their glory, carefully treating the innards, feet, jowls, and tails of beasts and fowl alike. Consuming this organ meat, or offal, arose from economic necessity, yet long before the frontiers of molecular gastronomy were braved, eating offal was a natural way to introduce interesting flavors and textures into dishes.
At what point, then, did we forsake these old customs? When did we begin to prefer flesh to the exclusion of offal, condemning the latter to the realm of the nasty and unsavory? For decades, offal devotees have searched far and wide, in butcher shops and restaurants, for any glimmer of hope. In recent years, we have begun to see signs of recognition among our peers, yet more is needed.
Nasty Bits Lovers, Unite! To embrace offal is to honor all that is delicious. Why limit one's palate to foods that are deemed "safe," when there is more to be tasted? Cow's tongue, braised and served in salsa verde, possesses the beefiness of cow with a uniquely creamy chew. A cold dish of pig ears, simmered and then thinly sliced, is wonderfully refreshing dressed in nothing more than sesame oil and soy sauce. And liver, perhaps the most maligned of innards, is a revelation when seared in bacon fat, rendering the organ so soft and unctuous in the center with a feral depth all its own.
The life of the principled omnivore is not always easy. Embrace offal, not just for its deliciousness, but because ignoring some parts of an animal while focusing on others is wasteful. And arguably, waste is the same as disrespect: a slight to the creature whose life has been lost for our sustenance and pleasure.
As a Nasty Bits lover, it took me some time to realize that not everyone grew up eating offal. My mother's kitchen was always filled with the aroma of tendon or gizzards braising in soy sauce and the sounds of chicken feet crackling in oil. When I was three, one of my favorite foods was her homemade chicken feet, which I would nibble with great gusto, taking particular satisfaction in spitting out the little segments of bone as I gnawed along.
In Shanghai, one of my favorite dishes is congealed chicken's blood made from a freshly slaughtered bird. In its congealed form, the blood takes on the consistency of the softest tofu, and it will most likely be cut up and served in chunks. Nestled in chicken broth and topped with green onions, the chicken's blood is so silken that it shimmies down the throat with barely a quiver.
But enough talk about blood. There will be plenty of time for that later. So as not to lose the faint-hearted in the first of a series, we begin with a fairly innocuous offering: lamb's neck simmered gently with a strong kick of lemon juice, for a stew faintly perfumed with thyme. While lamb's neck is neither an organ nor a strange appendage, it is certainly a lesser-known, underappreciated cut of the animal.
The neck muscles get plenty of exercise as the lamb lifts and lowers its head to graze; cooked over a longer period of time, the meat becomes soft and juicy, marbled throughout with just the right amount of fat. Eat the neck with relish right off the bone, nibbling around to retrieve the choicest slivers of meat and the occasional tendon.
This stew is actually very easy to make--there's no sweating of onions involved, and no carrots or celery to dice. Simply simmer the meat in stock or even water, and in less than an hour, you'll have achingly tender morsels of lamb swimming in a concentrated and heady broth.
Lamb's Neck Stew
Adapted from The River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
About the author: Chichi Wang took her degree in philosophy, but decided that writing about food would be much more fun than writing about Plato. She firmly believes in all things offal, the importance of reading great books, and the necessity of three-hour meals. If she were ever to get a tattoo, it would say "Fat is flavor." Visit her blog, My Chalkboard Fridge.