Jennifer’s post on Southern food that makes us go “gack!” or “eewwww!” raises several fascinating topics, and the one I want to address today is the human consumption of what the English call “offal” and Americans, being more squeamish, call “organ meats” or, even more common, “variety meats.” What human beings usually eat of animals, all that range of steaks, chops and roasts, are skeletal muscle. Offal referred to the viscera that was left after slaughtering — intestines (chitterlings), stomach (tripe), heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, thymus (sweetbreads) — and today extends to brains, ears, cheeks, necks, feet and tails.

What’s curious is how much factors of cultural orientation, class status and ethnic origins have to do with the consumption of offal. It’s typically members of peasant or agricultural societies that consume every part of their animals for the sake of economy (”waste not, want not”) or, moving to the city, cook with inner organs and so forth because they’re cheap. Yet the middle or upper class dining table that would reject chitlins and tripe or the euphemistically named “head cheese” (which does not contain brains, by the way) would welcome a perfectly cooked veal kidney or sweetbread served with the appropriate French sauce. (And if you like the seemingly numberless versions of sausages and salamis that the regions of Europe have invented, don’t forget that they are mostly composed of “variety meats.”)

The same paradoxical differences apply to restaurants. The “soul food” cuisine of the American South is famous for its use of, even its celebration of every part of the pig from the nose to the tail, “from squeal to heel.” Soul food restaurants serve chitlins (often on Fridays), tripe, pig’s feet, neck bones and hog maws, seasoned with lots of black pepper, as well, of course, as pork chops and ham. Country cooking or home-cooking restaurants always have a day for liver and onions with mashed potatoes and will occasionally serve neck bones, but you won’t see chitlins, tripe and so on. And then there are fine dining restaurants which, even in Memphis, consider sweetbeards with brown butter a gourmet delicacy but wouldn’t touch that other stuff.

For myself, I adore calf’s liver and foie gras and sweetbreads. I had veal kidneys once (at the now-closed Montrachet in New York) and they were delicious. No meat is more succulent than the bits you have to work to get off of neck bones or pig’s feet. I had tripe once in France (tripe a la mode de Caen) and don’t need to try it again, merci beaucoup. Never had chitlins. Also in France I had a roulade of veal with brains in the center; that was pretty good but I found the slippery-custardy texture off-putting. (Nor do I like marrow. Gack! ) I no longer eat foie gras because of the treatment of those poor ducks.

All of this matter, unfortunately, is bad for you, being ungodly high in cholesterol. And, if you have a tendency toward gout, a night of offal-indulgence might push you over the edge of an abyss of hideous, throbbing, trance-inducing pain.

And brains? Well, I think since Mad Cow nobody much eats brains.

The illustration at the top of this post is honeycomb tripe, from the cow’s second stomach; it’s from hormel.com. The second image is leaf or bible tripe, from the cow’s third stomach; it’s from foodsubs.com. Seared veal kidneys with parsley on brioche — YUM! — is from elegantsufficiency.typepad.com.