AWFUL OFFAL

Having liver and onions as one of my birthday meals brought the usual amount of protestations from my brother, Les, who was preparing the meal. He thinks the meat is disgusting.  He said, "Offal is awful!"  I like offal: livers, gizzards, tongues, hearts, kidneys, lungs, tripe, and brains (yes, I have eaten brains and enjoyed them). Being the youngest in the family Les was not as exposed to our wide variety of "epicurean delights" as the older ones were.

Gerald grimaces when I mention the "delicacies"; I've told him it's hard for me to believe that he grew up on a farm and had not had these treats. I said, "If I say I love pate de foie gras that'll be OK, rather than goose liver." I like braunschweiger (liverwurst) but I cannot tolerate blood pudding, head cheese or souse.

My mother would prepare any wild game brought except for opossum or raccoon .  I think it was because the opossum were so disgusting and we had raccoons as pets.  As kids, we ate ground hog and muskrat, but Mother insisted we say "marsh rabbit" as that euphemism sounded so much better. I never tasted "mountain oysters"; Mother said she was tricked into eating them once and although they were delicious, she would not have eaten them if she'd known what they were. 

I told Les I was going to write about eating squab.  He said, "Oh, that sounds so much better than saying you were eating DOVES!"  I said that squab was also pigeon.  He said, "That's even worse!"

The derivation of the saying "To eat humble pie", which means to apologize and face humiliation, is from the Old English word "umbles" which was the term for offal from deer and was considered "humble".