THE BATTLE OF THE OFFAL

Sogus kelle (lamb head meat with brain), a Turkish street food:

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In THE BATTLE OF THE BREADS, sourdough bread comfortably won with rye bread, ciabatta and baguettes coming next in the poll.

It's now the turn of offal to do battle! Sometimes known as giblets (if derived from birds), mystery meat, organ meat, variety meat, pluck and viscera, offal isn't easy to define bar from being 'waste' but still edible bits of a dead animal. But here goes, offal is the least favourite edible bits of an animal to be eaten. Or, alternatively, offal is what poor people had to or still eat. The phrase 'eating humble pie' stems from umble pie containing the innards of animals, which was a popular peasant food during medieval times in England. But in recent years many fancy chefs recently have made some offal dishes haute cuisine for the rich to eat.

In his 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, M F K Fisher observed: "One way to horrify at least eight out of ten Anglo-Saxons is to suggest their eating anything but the actual red fibrous meat of a beast." I suspect not that much has changed since those words were written.

This poll is taking an expansive view of what constitutes offal. So offal is not just the organs, entrails, guts and innards of animals but also other parts, including secretions, of animals not widely eaten nor widely desired to be eaten. For example, it's reputed that Casanova regularly added ambergris, sperm whale poo, to his chocolate mousse as an aphrodisiac! The English actress Sarah Miles admitted that she regularly drank her own urine.

However, many offal dishes contain a mix of offal ingredients. Mock turtle soup is an English soup made of animal brains and organs; it was created in the mid-eighteenth century as an imitation of green turtle soup when green turtles were hunted almost to extinction. The popular Scottish dish of haggis - see photo below - contains sheep's heart, liver and lungs minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices and salt, mixed with stock and encased in the sheep's stomach. The traditional British dish of faggots are meatballs usually containing anything that can eaten from a pig - for some reason, a faggot is also a derogatory term for a homosexual man here.

Haggis:

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There are some foods, such as casseroles, curries, dim sums, pies, rissoles, sausages, soups and stews, in which offal may be an ingredient. Quite often the person eating the food is unaware of eating offal. Intestines are often used as casings for sausages.

This poll is only concerned with single offal ingredients and not dishes with a mixture of offal ingredients. The only exception I've made are the pancreas and thymus that are both used to make sweetbreads. For each poll option, I've cited examples of dishes found across the world containing that offal ingredient.

The French city of Lyon is arguably the offal capital of the world. I can confirm, having spent a week in Lyon to take in the Tour de France and eating out in its restaurants for a week, that the Lyonnaise don't like leaving anything uneaten from an animal!

Though I do enjoy a sausage, it's not because of its intestinal casing. Likewise, I'm happy with a gravy made from bone stock to be served with my roast dinner and I like a fish soup provided I don't see the heads and eyes in the soup, but it's not the offal I like about those dishes. Presentation is key with offal.

Of the very few offal ingredients I've eaten, I only have two which I'm happy eating. First is liver, especially liver pâté (but not pâté de foie gras because of the way ducks and geese are force-fed in France) and fried liver served with mash and onion gravy. Second, and my favourite, is black pudding (aka blood pudding), especially served up as part of a fried breakfast - see photo below.

Discounting a hair served up in my food, of the few offal ingredients I've tried my least favourites are fish eggs in the form of caviar (expensive and very over-rated) and especially kidneys - a steak pie is ruined with urine-drenched kidneys!

Nearly all offal is awful, sorry for my dreadful pun! Offal is best left to dogs, hyenas, crows and vultures to eat. I don't want to eat anuses, bladders, brains, ears, eyes, gizzards, heads, hearts, intestines, lungs, pancreases, penises, rectums, scrotums, snouts, spleens, testicles, tongues, udders and uteruses, no matter how flavoursome and nutritious they are, unless I'm dying from starvation. I'm an Anglo-Saxon!

What is your most and least favourite offal ingredient?
What offal dishes have you eaten?
If in a faraway land and well outside of your gastronomic comfort zone, would you eat what's cooked for you on a plate if you suspected it may contain offal?

I've eaten haggis which I liked, and faggots which I didn't like.

In Lyon, I played it very safe what I ate in its offal-loving restaurants. But in Hong Kong, at a business lunch, I just ate what was served me even though there was probably all sorts of offal in the dim sums. I didn't ask what was in the dim sums, I just ate a couple to be polite. Also at that lunch I learnt that you are nobody unless you have a business card to give out (I had one!) and that age determines status - I was the appointed lead in the negotiations but, because my two colleagues were older and looked older, the Hong Kongers didn't want to negotiate with me!

Below is a poll where you can anonymously select your most favourite offal ingredient, or at least the offal ingredient you least dislike! Unfortunately only one pick is allowed in the poll.

But a poll on this site can only have 20 answer options. I've think I've covered most offals in my poll, but there was no room for anuses/rectums (eg dwaeji-makchang, qarta, pork bung, warthog anus), bile (eg pig bile), bladders (eg pig bladder), bones (including bone marrow; eg bone broth/soup/stock, gulai sumsum, masi, roasted bone marrow, Schweinshaxe), combs and wattles, eyes (eg boiled fish eyes, fish eyes soup, tacos de ojos), faeces/feces (eg ambergris), fins (eg shark fin soup), gallbladders, gizzards (eg gizdodo, jaatey, jiujiuya, pickled turkey gizzards, tak-ttongjip, zúzapörkölt), hair/fur, horns (eg rhino horn powder), larynxes, mucus, penises (aka pizzles; eg cow cod soup, sautéed bull penis, tiger penis soup), placentas, saliva (eg bird's nest soup), scrotums, semen, smegma, snouts/noses (eg pig snoots, spicy pig snout stir-fry), spleens (eg limpa, Milzwurst, suvarotti), tracheas (eg urute), udders (aka elders), urine and uteruses (eg stir-fried pig uterus).

I think livers will win this poll. But cheeks, fish eggs, kidneys, skins, tails and tongues may figure in the running.

Please see the first comment below to see what has won each battle of the food and drinks so far.

Black pudding:

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