SC - OOP, liver cooking challenge
Mordonna22@aol.com
Mordonna22 at aol.com
Sat Apr 22 16:04:41 PDT 2000
Sieggy, dear
Organ meats are not "traditionally considered to be offal."
This is a relatively modern assessment. Rather, as with most things, it
varied from cuisine to cuisine, and from animal to animal. For several
reasons, organ meats were often considered luxuries, chiefly because they do
not lend themselves to prolonged storage as readily as muscle meat, and
because the organs make up less of the animal in volume (i.e. a 1000 lb.
steer will produce about 450-500 lbs of dressed muscle, and only about 10-15
lbs of organ meat, including heart, liver, tongue, lungs, spleen, kidneys,
tripe etc....) In most agrarian societies organ meat is a luxury indulged
in only around butchering time. The advent of canning, and more recently
freezing has made organ meats available year round now days, but its scarcity
in relation to the muscle means it is still a rare treat. It seems to be
only in urbanized societies that organ meat is considered yucky stuff. I
would attribute that to the difficulty in preserving it, thus making it
unfamiliar to most urban dwellers.
Mordonna the Cook,
SunDragon's Western Reaches
Atenveldt
(m.k.a. Buckeye, AZ)
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