THE NASTY BITS | March 6th 2008

Addictive Picasso/flickr

Deep-fried tripe? Tendon salad? Heart puttanesca? All fair game in the capable hands of Chris Cosentino, whose head-to-tail dinners have become cult foodie events. Jon Fasman, our in-house omnivore, goes to see what all the fuss is about (and leaves with a delectable recipe for marinated pig's head) ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

On a rainy Tuesday night in lower Manhattan, about 80 people gathered in a long, brick-walled room above a liquor store to eat the parts of animals that most people throw away. Cooking this six-course tour of the abattoir floor was Chris Cosentino, the head chef at Incanto, in San Francisco, and the proprietor of Offal Good, a blog devoted to exactly what you think it's devoted to.

Cosentino's head-to-tail dinners have become something of a cult foodie event in the Bay Area; this was the first time he had done one of them away from home. Michael Ruhlman, a food writer whose book "Charcuterie" (written with Brian Polcyn) is indispensable to anyone with even a passing interest in cured meats and sausages, emceed the event. It was a long meal and I took a lot of pictures. (I'm no photographer, and my camera is held together with spit, tape and goodwill, but I wanted to document the evening thoroughly. Apologies in advance for the spotty quality.) That's all the introduction you'll get from me.

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What a lovely room! What a stylish crowd! What winsome greeters! Seriously: very winsome greeters. Nice work, Astor Center.

Though gathered for gluttony, the crowd seems no fatter or more dissipated, proportionally, than your average gaggle of New Yorkers. Before supper there is some circulating and some meeting and greeting. Since I came alone and don't really know anyone in the New York food scene, I have no one to greet. I sit by myself at the table furthest from the door.

Shortly after I take my seat, a waiter approaches with the first of the night's wines. Each course will be paired with a different Italian wine. This one, to go with the four hors d'oeuvres, is a Pignoletto from Emilia-Romagna.

It was light, dry, perhaps a bit more frontally acidic than most sparkling wines. Quite pleasant but unremarkable. A while back, the New York Times dining section ran a piece on pairing sparkling wines and food in which one writer suggested the perfect matches for champagne were sushi and fried chicken. It was a brilliant, unorthodox observation, implying that champagne works best when played off something rich in feeling as well as taste. Sushi is hardly high-fat, but the unctuousness of raw flesh, like the oiliness of fried chicken, is nicely cut by sparkling wine's bubbles. It was an excellent pairing for the four canapés that followed.

First came two small bites: at the back, on the fork, is porchetta di testa, which is a boned, rolled, marinated pig's head that's slowly braised, then left to cool and set in its own gelatin until it congeals into something sliceable. It's sort of an upscale head cheese (Cosentino has an excellent step-by-step recipe on his blog--informative, but not for the squeamish). It had a rich, silky texture and a wonderfully full, pork flavour--heaven's lunchmeat. Nice call, too, topping it with a slice of peppery radish and sharp pecorino--like the champagne, they cut the richness beautifully ("cutting the richness" would become the evening's theme).

A soft-boiled egg and shaved cured pork heart topped the crouton in front. Ordinarily, the thought of eating an egg would have made me retch (I haven't touched a bite of egg in almost three decades), but in the spirit of the evening, I managed to swallow this one. It was fine. I don't think soft-boiled egg and pork heart sandwiches will replace ham-and-egg rolls anytime soon, but I'm glad I tried it.

Quivering atop the spoon in this picture is a small mound of beef-heart tartare puttanesca. Heart is a confounding little muscle. Cooked too long, it becomes rather mealy; cooked quickly, it has an octopus-like rubberiness that can put some diners off. Cosentino solved this conundrum well: he didn't cook it at all. This was a real triumph: lighter in texture and flavour than traditional beef tartare, and brilliantly seasoned (puttanesca is an Italian sauce made from garlic, anchovies, capers, olives and tomatoes, served atop a long, dry pasta, usually spaghetti). This mouthful reassured any diner who may have worried about an evening of strong and organy dishes. It had a lovely deep-red colour, too, which my picture doesn't do justice, unfortunately.

Whether in andouillette, menudo or kokoretsis, tripe has a strong, deep-in-the-body taste that needs to be matched with equally strong seasoning. I've always found it a rather soothing, especially when braised in something flavourful. This tames the taste and gives it a reassuring, blankety texture.

To make the dish you see above, Cosentino first braised the tripe with vanilla beans, then deep-fried it, and sprinkled some ground picholine olives and marjoram over the top (the paper cone was a nice touch: these are the Devil's boardwalk fries). I thought it was excellent--again, a perfect match of salty, sharp and funky--but others at my table were less ecstatic. Once you got past the crunch, it really did taste of guts. I wouldn't have wanted more than this, but these five bites treated me well.

At this point, we all took our seats. The waiters poured the next wine:

This is a Nero d'Avola, and it was one of the evening's best wines. Astringent, spicy, without any sweetness and almost no finish, it was a perfect foil for the upcoming richness.

Cosentino--miked up and on camera from the Astor Center's kitchen--then made a brief speech introducing the dinner. Offal, he said, offered chefs a range of different flavours and textures. He said his Neapolitan grandmother made offal when he was young, and he always hated it. What changed, for him, was being present when a goat was slaughtered, and holding two kids as they died. "When you take that animal, and you don't serve all of it," he said, crying as he spoke, "you're a horrible person. I saw what would be thrown away and, ethically, I couldn't do it." Rejecting offal, he said, defeats the purpose of local and sustainable farming and eating.

Now, I'm not sure that I'd call everyone who dislikes tripe and kidneys horrible people, but he makes a good point: if you're going to eat meat, you should be willing to eat as much of it as you can. Your McNuggets, the pepperoni on your pizza, the bacon on your sandwich: all of those were once living, breathing, sentient creatures that gave their lives for you. If you're willing to eat them, it seems, for lack of a better word, discourteous not to make the most of them. (That offal may be enjoying its gourmet moment is something I've written about before.)

If this message moved the moralist in me, his first sentence appealed to the hedonist: offal provides a wonderful variety of tastes and textures from which a chef as talented as Cosentino can really make something outstanding. Take, for instance, this next dish:

The little fried nodules are sweetbreads (pancreas and thymus); the translucent strips are beef tendons; and the colourful bits are chillies, mint and arugula. He braised the tendons en masse and let them congeal into a block, which he then shaved with a meat slicer (nb: many organ meats are high in cartilage and collagen, hence the tendency toward congealing, a usually unwelcome problem that Cosentino uses to his advantage).

The sweetbreads were as perfect as they look: tender and rich, with the sort of exterior crunch that only comes from being fried in animal fat (he used duck). But the tendons were the real revelation, with a cool snap like the bean-thread noodles used in South-East Asian cooking. I don't think I've ever had tendons except in pho, but if I could make them taste like this I'd eat them regularly.

This Ribolla Gialla was one of the strangest wines I've ever tasted. The woman sitting across from me lifted the glass to her nose and announced it smelled like Scotch. It didn't, quite, but I could see what she meant: it had the dark colour and richness of a fortified wine, but it was all front, all acid, with absolutely no sweetness and no finish. It felt--not quite tasted, but felt--as though someone had pasted your tongue with scotch tape, then lifted it off: first you had a taste sensation, then it was gone, but there was nothing at the end that lingered. I know I'm not selling it well, but you have to trust me: it wasn't delicious as much as it was interesting. Worth trying at least once.

It was paired with this mammoth dish: two cakes made from braised pig's feet, fried in duck fat and served alongside a small lobster, grapefruit and tarragon salad. The sauce atop the cakes is aioli made from lobster innards and lobster stock. Chefs of Cosentino's ilk love the trotter for its rich mixture of fat, flesh and collagen. He deployed it well: this cake tasted great, though I couldn't quite manage more than a couple of bites.

Deep-fried richness topped with more richness just got to be too much, and it points to the one complaint I had about this dinner: portion size. If you're going to preach to your diners about not wasting animals, don't give them twice as much as they can eat. I know the kitchen staff probably polished off what was left, but this was way too much food.

Another unconventional wine, this Sangue di Giuda (literally, "blood of the Jew") was a sweet, sparkling red. The guy next to me said, "It tastes pretty good, but if someone poured it out of a Dr Pepper can, I wouldn't know it was wine." Indeed.

I could only manage half a bite of this one. Raw liver. Not quite raw, Cosentino said--it was "soused": smoking-hot olive oil was poured over the slices. In other words, raw. To his credit, Cosentino knew it would be a tough sell. "Just one bite," he pleaded on the video screen. "That's all I'm asking." OK. Done. What can I say: it had the texture of raw liver and the astringency of the vinegar in which it was doused. Imagine yanking a snail off the side of a house and sticking your tongue deep inside the shell, and you're about halfway there. I'm all for using all parts of the animal, but let's cook it, shall we?

This is a Niederra Rosso, another huge Italian red. Tasted like tobacco, leather and spice. Nice long finish. The sort of wine that tastes wonderful but gives you a screaming headache if you drink any more than this. I paced myself.

This is a whole roasted lamb neck, rubbed with Meyer lemons, garlic and wild fennel (Cosentino called it "freeway fennel", because it grows along California's highways--and cue the collective "What am I doing on this coast again?" question as the crowd stares out at the rainy 45ºF night). He cooked it at about 200ºF for seven hours, until it almost confited itself: the fat rendered back into the meat, leaving it incredibly rich, with a crackling skin. He served it with two forks; you plunged one deep into the vertebrae and used the other to shred the meat, until your plate looked like this:

It was every bit as delicious as it looks. Unfortunately, it was also much too much food for a fifth course. I would make this myself in a hot second, but as much as I wanted to put the whole thing away, I couldn't manage more than a couple of token bites.

Cosentino, before the meal, warned us that this was rich food and we didn't have to finish everything. "But I do," he boasted. A few weeks ago I was talking with friend of who edits food books, who told me a story about a night out with a famous chef who was celebrating a book launch. They stayed out until 3:30am. My friend somehow got into a cab, got home, and managed to drag himself queasily into work late the next morning. The chef had been on the phone since 8am, talking business. This is by way of saying that I'd be willing to guess many first-rate chefs are genetic freaks: they can process huge quantities of food and alcohol more efficiently than the rest of us.

After this neck I cried uncle.

Dessert wines. They're making a comeback, I hear. This mystifies me: short of a sledgehammer to the temple, there is no surer route to a headache than sweet wine. That said, this Recioto di Soave wasn't bad. It tasted a bit like sweet popcorn, with a full, honeyed graininess that matched well with candied cockscombs:

These are the crests atop and the wattles beneath a rooster's head. Pure collagen. And unexpectedly delicious. He braised them with bay leaf, bay blossom, sugar, vanilla, pepper and blood orange: they tasted like spring-flavoured gummi bears.

And that's that. You can go to a thousand restaurants in this city and eat something that tastes good, but how often does a dinner edify you? This really was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Was there a macho element to it? Sure, maybe. But so what. If I'm unlikely to ever eat or serve raw liver again, I've been awakened to the possibilities of tendon, head and neck.

(Jon Fasman is an editor for Economist.com, and the author of two novels, both published by The Penguin Press: The Geographer's Library, a New York Times bestseller that was published in 2005, and The Unpossessed City, coming out in November 2008. He profiled Dave Arnold, a culinary inventor, for the Autumn 2007 issue of Intelligent Life.)