Edible Animals

[ysabetwordsmith]

My inner teenage boy was deeply amused by this billboard showing a spectrum of pets to food animals.

Me, I'm a pragmatist.  Anything I can get into my mouth and digest safely is potential food.  In practice, I strongly prefer not to eat other sapient beings unless I am starving to death, so things like cetacean, elephant, and primate are off my list of edibles outside of that context.  There are a few things I choose not to eat because I disapprove of their production methods; farmed veal exceeds my personal tolerance for animal abuse.  However, historic veal is in the same class as buckling for me -- used to be, all the milk animals would drop about 50% male offspring that you didn't need, so you dressed them out right then and had the tenderest meat ever.  That I would gleefully eat if I had the chance.  There are plenty of things I'd like to try, haven't encountered yet, and probably wouldn't want to eat routinely; dog and horse are both in that category.  So are insects, a key indicator that I am not culturally an American despite living here.  My everyday category is wider too: rabbit, goat, and lamb are all things I actively look for and order when I find them.  I also enjoy some animal parts that most Americans do not, including tongue, brains, heart, gizzard, and testicles.  I loved haggis the one time I got it.  However, I have tried kidney and wasn't fond of it; I really dislike liver and would have to be ravenous to eat it willingly.

These are all things that vary widely by culture and time period.  What are some of your settings?

Comments

Re: Foods and preferences

[technoshaman]

I'll be after havin' the recipe for chicken livers in cajun dirty rice. NOM.

Seconded on goat, NOM! And pig meat.

I couldn't find kidney, so I figured out how to cheat: Use chicken livers instead of kidney. Makes a damn fine pie. First time I made a GF crust, too - dead simple, rice flour and shortening, I don't remember the proportions but it turned out just fine.

Oh. Best vegetarian restaurant in Seattle? Kosher Chinese place called Bamboo Garden. Kashrut certificates visible from outside the door. Neither meat nor milk enter the building; it's all veggie, and they can do things with tofu and mushrooms like you would not believe. This certified carnivore took home leftovers... and ate them happily!

Re: Foods and preferences

[dialecticdreamer]

The last cookbook I bought is from the 1930's, "Polish Cooking," which is a delight to browse. I pick a new recipe each week to try. This week, it was liver dumplings, which were mostly beaten eggs, bread crumbs, and a few tablespoons of chicken liver, made into VERY small balls and cooked in stock. Best as a contrast to some strongly salty stock, like miso soup...

My dirty rice recipe isn't really a RECIPE as a starting point, but here goes:

Dirty rice

1 lb sausage (note, I use ground chicken and spice it myself- start with ½ Tbsp sage and ¼ tsp red pepper flakes, and an equal amount of nutmeg, plus a pinch of WHITE pepper. Fully cook a marble-sized sample and taste, adjusting spices)
1 lb chicken livers
A few tablespoons of oil IF using homemade, lower-fat sausage.

1 medium green bell pepper, diced
2 red or orange peppers, diced
1 large onion, diced fine
3 stalks celery, chopped fine
2 cups long grain rice (Frankly, I've used lots of different types. Don't use black rice or sushi rice, but other than that, use what's to hand and tastes good to you.)

2Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
a full bunch of green onions, chopped fine
3 cloves of garlic (I usually use two per pound as a rule of thumb)
a bunch of parsley, of your preferred type, chopped very fine. I also use curled parsley and cilantro half-and-half for this
salt, white and cayenne pepper
½ tsp sage (if you use ready-made sausage)
2 or 3 bay leaves
hefty pinch of gumbo file (NOTE-IF you like it, you probably LOVE it, and if you don't you can leave it out. For those who don't know what it is, "gumbo file" or "file powder" is ground sassafras leaves.)

A quart of flavorful liquid –stock, potato broth, garlic broth, whatever's easy. For those who buy it, two cans of prepped commercial broth is another option.)
1/2c to 1c of extra water if needed.

Start by chopping, dicing, and mincing the vegetable ingredients and keep them in separate piles for the moment.

Roughly mince the garlic, then put the salt on the cutting board and use the flat of the knife to make the garlic into a nearly perfect paste. It takes only a couple of seconds, and is a tremendous help to the flavor. For those who need to use less garlic, this will maximize the flavor of even a single clove.

Use a heavy skillet (my cast iron is perfect for this), brown the sausage and livers together, mashing the livers into smaller bits while stirring, until there is NO PINK left. None. It's not worth rushing this step, even if you KNOW you're going to keep it on the heat for twenty more minutes.

Drain off all but roughly 3Tbsp of oil-- when using homemade sausage you will NEED to add liquid oil or lard for it. Conversely, keep draining the commercial sausage as you work, or you'll practically be deep-frying the meat!

Add the diced (bulb) onions, the peppers, and celery, and stir attentively until the onion pieces begin to turn translucent.

Add the garlic paste, the cayenne, white pepper, and bay leaves along with the rice and green onions, and keep stirring for just a minute or two, until the rice just starts to become translucent. This step will allow your rice to remain separate rather than sticky, and actually cuts about ten minutes off the overall cooking time. Once you master this technique, Rice-A-Roni becomes “Box-o-Ripoff.”

Add a quart of flavorful liquid and the Worcestershire sauce, stir to coat everything, then turn the heat to low. Simmer, COVERED for twenty minutes.

Pick out those pesky bay leaves before they break into little shards of viciousness!

Cook until the liquid is mostly absorbed. Taste and correct seasoning with a pinch of black pepper, a bit more cayenne, or an equally tiny pinch of smoked paprika, depending upon your preferred flavor profiles. Add the parsley (or parsley and cilantro), and stir attentively to cook through for another minute or two and incorporate the last of the liquid.

I seldom have leftovers for this dish, no matter HOW big the batch is-- but expect this to serve eight as a generous main dish. (When feeding teenagers, this was called “a snack.”)

Re: Foods and preferences

[mdlbear]

I've had steak-and-kidney pie -- delicious. Same for sweatbreads (pancreas).