SC - Organ Meats

[Mordonna22 at aol.com]

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)