Sweetbreads

I gave ten years of my life to vegetarianism.

I had decided to try it on during a rather Caribbean chapter of my musical career. Rastafarian bandmates and their Ital (kosher) dietary restrictions intrigued me.  I was impressionable.  Branching out from mangia-cake cooking were my first tastes of Indian curries.  Arabic flavours.  Somehow this new sense of adventure led me to try meatlessness.

Within a year, I spiralled ignorantly from full-fledged flesh-eater to a grazing, bloated, lethargic, herbivorous idiot. Unmethodical in my diet, I simply removed animal protein from my life and within 12 months (and an eleventh-hour re-introduction of cheese) I was, for reasons unknown to me, a card-carrying veggie.  It was a long dull road. I was pale. I lied to myself about my exciting options when eating out.  During this time I volunteered for Amnesty International and campaigned briefly for Greenpeace. Coincidence?

A decade later I awoke from this tofu-stupor.  I could not remember why I began or how I arrived, but goddammit I was hungry.

The return to my once ominvoral state was not easy.   A trip to The Black Mountains and a daily diet of rare Welsh beef was a good start.  I coupled this beautiful, bloody rebirth with copious amounts of burgundy and beer.  After three weeks of unrelenting heartburn and hangovers, I defibrillated my appetite firmly back into the 15th century.

I now eat anything given to me.  If there is a bone to pick (pun intended), it is only in the naming of food.   

Tell it like it is.  

Give it to me straight. 

If I'm eating testicles, don't call them Rocky Mountain Oysters.  Domestic pets?  No problem, just give it a proper name and use lots of butter.  Budgie in béarnaise.  Lemon ferret.  Scientific names would suffice.  There is a Phodopus Sungorus lovingly wrapped in a shoebox in the backyard.  There was a ceremony.  It bit everyone, shat everywhere and if it hadn't been my daughter's pet it might have been delicious in a mushroom demi-glace.   

The Chilean Sea Bass was once the Patagonian Toothfish.   

'Sea Urchin' or 'Whore's Eggs'?   Both contenders in a sushi bar methinks. 

On a chalkboard menu in Toronto this weekend, tucked unassumingly between liver and bone marrow, I read "Sweetbreads". This collection of pancreatic miscellany and/or thymus succotash came with bread. Fourteen dollars.  Despite a tendency to gravitate towards the deliciously unpopular, hipsters will be hipsters. 

Etymologically speaking, the word sweetbreads is vague at best.  It's history is as ambiguous as a can of Spam.  How organ meats get such a deceiving nom-de-plume is beyond me.  It's possible that 'bread' might refer to old English's reference to meat.  Sure, one can assume without even tasting, that bits of a calf's throat are probably sweeter than its tail.  Still, foodies and hipsters alike embrace this misnomer for cow guts.

Culinary camouflage.  Cow patties, er bullshit, I say.

Offal, a more fitting alias for this collection of colourful innerds, sounds just like it looks.  Not a perfect onomatopoeia I admit, but organ meat has literally fallen 'off' the butchers block.  It just looks awful (earlobe tug) too, in its pale fleshy colour palettes. Whether strewn unceremoniously by road-kill or methodically removed by a French boucherie, it's not pretty.

Speaking of the French, they are painfully honest.

Ris de Veau.  Calf sweetbreads. A little more honest.

Foie De Gras.   Fatty Liver.  No getting around this one.

I'm not knocking organ meat.  Organs are the hardest working bits.  They operate 24-7.  Ask my liver.  Regular meat by comparison, the muscle tissue, nicely cellophaned in the grocery store was, in its previous incarnation, asleep for half of the time.  Right now in Japan's Hyogo prefecture, Kobe cows are being massaged by people into the most expensive, laziest beef on earth.

On the cellular level from barbe-a-queue it's all the same amino acids anyway.

Eat up.

Learn French.