Sweetbreads

"Butcher Fred: Hey Maurice, why can't we seem to sell all of this weird glandular meat Rancher Bob sold us on the cheap? I tried it, and it's really good.

Butcher Maurice: I don't know, man... People just seem to get freaked out when I try to sell them on it.

Fred: Hmmm... what are you calling it?

Maurice: "Weird glandular meat we got on the cheap."

Fred: Well, there's your problem! You can't tell people about strange cheap organs and expect to make them hungry. We need to market it better, maybe give it a new name, something, I dunno, lovely sounding. Like 'sugarmeats' or 'candy steak.'

Maurice: How about 'sweetbreads'?

Fred: Perfect!"

Nobody knows the origin of the term "sweetbreads" or why it was used to describe the thymus and pancreas of cows, sheep and pigs. Scott Gold, in the above excerpt from his book Shameless Carnivore: a Manifesto for Meat Lovers, suggests the name was a gimmick to help them sell. One that worked -- sweetbreads are one of the most expensive offal cuts and frequently seen on restaurant menus, prized by chefs for their tender, creamy texture and delicate flavor.

When I tasted sweetbreads for the first time about a month ago I thought the name made sense. Mine came from a lamb, were dusted with flour and pan fried at Athens on 4th, a Greek restaurant in Tucson -- brown and crispy on the outside and rich and doughy in the center. Had they been powdered with confectioner's sugar and served without the lemon wedge, diced tomatoes, garlic and scallions, I suspect they might have looked like a funnel cake, and tasted only a little less sweet.

An Intro to Offal

Anthony Bourdain called them The Nasty Bits. Your supermarket's butcher probably calls them leftovers. But to unapologetic carnivores like me, they are proudly, offal.

Pronounced "awful," the word is derived from "off" and "fall" -- meaning the trimmings that fall from a hanging animal that has been disemboweled. It is collectively the organs and glands of a butchered beast that are not muscle (except tongue) or bone. The head (tongue, brains, cheeks, ears), lungs, tail, feet, testicles (fries), heart, kidneys, liver, intestines, pancreas or thyroid (sweetbreads), stomach (tripe), giblets (gizzard, neck, heart and liver of fowl) are all examples of offal. To some they are the never-in-a-million-years-will-I-try-that foods and to others their rich texture and complex flavors are a delicacy worthy of the gods.

Eating offal is not a contest. Not to me at least. I am not trying to gross out or shock onlookers or prove my manhood. I don't eat it because of a dare or a bet. I eat it because it's delicious. It is undeniably the most interesting of all foods -- the nuanced tastes and textures are different than any other cut of meat and the preparation requires more time and skill. Bourdain, in the introduction to the book on offal -- The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, by Fergus Henderson -- put it this way: "Nearly anyone -- after a few tries -- can grill a filet mignon or a sirloin steak. A trained chimp can steam a lobster. But it takes love, and time, and respect for one's ingredients to properly deal with a pig's ear or a kidney. And the rewards are enormous."

There are also philosophical reasons to why I eat variety meats (what offal is often referred to in American butcher shops). It feels good to eat the bits that are usually overlooked. If an animal is born, raised and killed and butchered for the one purpose of eventually arriving on my dinner plate, then I believe I am respecting that animal's life, however short, by appreciating all that it had to offer. It's a more traditional approach to eating meat -- our agrarian ancestors couldn't afford to be wasteful, they knew there was more to a cow than a steak and more to a pig than bacon or ham, and they made use of it. They ate it. And I bet they loved it just like I do. Food was better when it was simpler, before the prepackaged, boneless-skinless chicken breasts and before the frozen burger patty days that I grew up in. It's important that we get back to a simpler, more mindful way of eating, especially concerning our livestock. I'm doing my part, I'm eating offal.