Surprisingly Tasty Recipes from Surprisingly Icky Ingredients
Americans happen to get some pretty firm opinions about what food they consider non-icky. America, these days, discards millions of tons of dark chicken meat because Americans believe it’s icky. If that’s what they think about chicken drumsticks, the less spoken about other strange parts of animals we slaughter, the better. There is that scene in the first installment of the Hannibal series of movies, Red Dragon; Anthony Hopkins, playing Hannibal, is serving a cannibalistic dinner to a high-society gathering without telling them what it is. He tells them, “If I told you what it was, I’m afraid you wouldn’t eat it,” – to much laughter. Is it possible Americans are just as revolted when it refers parts of animals that they consider disgusting – tongue, testicles, brains, eyes? For example, lots of people hate liver; they consider it kind of powdery, sort of fatty and the wrong texture. However, handed to an accomplished chef, liver turns into mousse pate – a delicacy person would pay a great deal for. Can you turn any kind of disgusting animal part into tasty recipes? How about brains?
We export the brains of butchered pigs and cows by the barrelful to the Far East because no one will eat brains over here 
. However, that has to change. In certain highfalutin’ restaurants, they make and serve served tasty recipes that go far $100 a pop with names like pork brain terrine. It’s a whole confection with a sweet outside and a creamy brain center who Americans really would love if they were not told anything about it. Chefs love brains; they make for such superbly tasty recipes. To start with, they absorb spice and flavor unlike most other parts of an animal. When you cook them long enough, they turn crispy. If people here were to start trying brains, they would likely turn more popular than KFC.
In reality, you don’t even need to go as far as the Far East to discover people who think strange parts of animals make for tasty recipes.
Haggis, a famously stomach-churning recipe over in Scotland is a sheep’s stomach stuffed full with all varieties of animal organs – the heart, the lungs and kidneys. They boil the whole thing, and it’s kind of a staple. Even more ick-inducing is the black pudding. This is a recipe made of pig’s blood and additional appetizing ingredients. For some reason, America has really moved away from its European roots when it refers a taste for meat.
Maybe the reason America is a little finicky about its food is that everybody shops at a supermarket where nothing really appears like it came from an animal. You just get this tray of neatly-packaged bloodless meat that looks clean -like a vegetable. Even in America, in farms where everybody knows about how an animal is raised and slaughtered and cut up it’s easy to see that fussiness about food isn’t an American quality. It is merely an urban food-from-a-package quality.
