[Sca-cooks] Organ meat, was OOP Bugs was:International recipe site

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:

>I have cooked and eaten liver - not a favorite food. However, when i 
>was in Germany i had something the name of which i don't exactly 
>recall - something like Leben Sauer - which was sort of like 
>sauerbrauten, but made with liver. Now, THAT was good.

Liver's also good with bitter sauces, say, one made with stout or 
Angostura bitters. It might even be good with red-eye gravy ;-). I 
guess one school of thought is to complement the bitterness of the 
meat with a sour sort of opposite flavor, but you can actually make 
it seem like, well, like it's supposed to be there, to good effect.

>Kidneys... well, if i wanted to eat food out of a urinal i would...

Hot button. I was with you up till that one. Where do people think 
kidneys got that urine from, and where did it go from there? If one 
is so turned off by urine in contact with food that's subsequently 
been washed and cooked, at that point one might as well be a 
vegetarian, because anything that's been in contact with the animal's 
bloodstream is essentially urine-treif. As for the claim that kidneys 
taste of urine, that's pretty silly. How much urine have the people 
making that claim tasted, and if any, why do most acids taste sour 
while uric acid, if it's the predominant flavor of kidneys, does not? 
Same for smell. You wash the meat; some like to marinate it in milk 
or salted water, but while they have an aroma, it isn't the aroma of 
urine. I wonder how one would set up a blind aroma test?

Now, if one simply gave them an honest try and decided they were a 
little livery (they usually are) or were overcooked and a bit rubbery 
(again, a frequent problem, but not exclusive to kidneys), that would 
be one thing, but I think some people, if you put a bite of 
medium-rare porterhouse steak in their mouths, they'd like it until 
you told them it was kidney, at which point they'd start telling you 
all about the smell, and complain of urine.

>Tripe - not on my list of edible foods. I've eaten it cooked by 
>Mexicans, Thai, French, and Peruvians - just to make sure i didn't 
>have a mental prejudice. I don't. I just dislike the texture.

Many people do. Chinese preparations sometimes include a marination 
overnight with a pinch of baking soda, which tenderizes it to the 
point where it can be stir-fried from its raw state. The texture is a 
little like that of conch or squid, then. I also like some of the 
French tripe recipes that involve a par-boiling and then frying it. 
When people use "French" and "tripe" in the same sentence they 
usually mean "a la mode du Caen" (an allegedly period dish, by the 
way), and that stuff is overcooked even by most French standards. 
Fresh, it tastes canned ;-).

>I'm not a big organ meat eater, but i try to make sure it isn't just mental...

I'm not big on eyes. Yep. It's mental. But I don't care...

Adamantius