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Image credit: Louis Thomas I have never been to anywhere more chaotically beautiful than Palermo, the capital of Sicily. Traffic lights seemingly offer loose guidelines of when drivers should stop, and pavements and roads merge into one for the swarms of Vespas, or Vespe, rather, buzzing around you. I thought I would hate being woken up […]
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Image credit: Louis Thomas. Description: a roasted ox heart with a Christmas hat on it. The ox was dead, to begin with. I know this because I bought its heart on the Internet. The festive season is closing in and if, like me, you are a disgusting glutton, then this provides the perfect opportunity to […]
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Image credit: Pixabay. Description: an Italian butcher’s shop. It will be no secret to anyone who has read this section or spoken to me this term (though that’s not exactly a high number of people) that I am passionate about, or perhaps bewitched by, offal. It seems that there are two sorts of people in […]
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Image credit: Louis Thomas. Description: pork crackling, fresh out of the oven. “As a youth, I used to weep in butchers’ shops”, as Uncle Monty remarks in Withnail and I, is a statement which strangely resonates with me. I’m clearly not particularly sensitive when it comes to seeing an animal being sliced up on a […]
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Image credit: Louis Thomas. Description: a dome of jelly around which lies various USSR-related items. One hundred and one years ago, the world was changed forever: the Russian Revolution would sweep aside the Tsar, and the empire he reigned over, replacing it with a new society, one which promised peace, bread and land. However, not […]
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Image credit: Louis Thomas. Descripton: Louis Thomas doing an impression of Don Vito Corleone from The Godfather while holding a liver sandwich. A man who doesn’t spend time frying innards in lard can never be a real man. Few offal dishes have quite the same reputation as the Sicilian spleen sandwich, “pani cà meusa”, the quintessential […]
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Image credits: Louis Thomas. Description: a pig’s liver in a bowl with a bottle of wine. Ancient Roman Emperors, before they were dulled by the influence of Christianity, used to have a haruspex to inspect the entrails of a sacrificed animal in order to predict the future. Checking for blemishes and the like. It would […]
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Image Credit: Louis Thomas- Description-A plate of offal in a tomato sauce I came, I saw, I stewed a cow’s stomach lining in a tomato sauce for an hour. Few parts of the animal encourage quite the same revulsion as tripe. Even the name sounds unpleasant, with its alternative meaning being “nonsense”, it definitely needs a […]
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Offal is cheap, nutritious, less wasteful and, if done properly, can be absolutely delicious. As a society we have shifted away from the cheaper cuts, instead favouring much more expensive but more photogenic foods. However, as Britain oozes towards Brexit like a snail towards a hungry Frenchman, it appears that we may have to once […]
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