New York Food Blog

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​Bone marrow is the adipose tissue that resides inside an animal's hollow bones. It is of two types: red bone marrow generates new blood cells, while yellow bone marrow is mainly fat. As an animal ages, much of what what was originally red bone marrow turns into yellow bone marrow.

For culinary purposes, most bone marrow is the tissue inside the shin bone of a cow, pig, or lamb. It is much prized by the French and the Fujianese, and ignored by most of the world's other culinary traditions. The French manufacture narrow spoons to scoop the roasted marrow from bones, while the Fujianese deposit the bones directly into soups.

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​(Click to examine more carefully.)

Pig intestines are central to Chinese cooking in several regions, nowhere more so than on the island of Taiwan. At the new Taiwanese restaurant Island of Taiwan--atypically located in Bay Ridge, across the street from Spartan Souvlaki--both small and large intestines are stewed and sauteed. Large intestines, also known in English as "bung," are stewed in the above photo in an incendiary broth with such other ingredients as sprouts, leeks, and cubes of pig-blood jelly, which is said to have medicinal powers. The dish is called "pig intestine in fire casserole," and costs $10.99. 6817 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-680-0033

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​A pal recently sent me an entry from the blog Zester Daily that concerns some Pasadena residents who decided to eat a human placenta, and supposedly got the hospital to cooperate. The piece is littered with inaccuracies (for example, the gestated egg called balut is Philippine, not Vietnamese) and strange Teutonic capitalizations, but it details how a dinner was assembled when law student Hathanh Nguyen's sister, Danthanh Fields, an orthodontics resident at USC, gave birth and, "One of the nurses was nice enough to put it [the placenta] in a plastic takeout container, complete with white plastic takeout bag, and told us that it should be refrigerated."

​Organs are so simple, it would be hard to screw them up, right? It's generally the case that if you treat them with reverence, cook them simply and carefully, that they come out perfect every time, especially if you wash them properly.

But even the Organ Meat Society sometimes stumbles on organs that are not worth eating. Such was recently the case when I was scouting organ-eating venues in the Silicon Valley. On my list was an ancient, red-sauced Italian joint called Original Joe's, right in downtown San Jose.

​McCarren Park may be the very last place where you'd expect to find organs, yet, last Sunday I did. The occasion was the summer picnic of a Greenpoint Peruvian soccer club, attended by perhaps 300 souls, who sat on folding chairs under the London plane trees as bad weather threatened. Undeterred, they grooved on a series of singers who ranged from perfect pitch to outright caterwauling, accompanied by a pair of stentorian guitarists.

There was food, too, doled out under red awnings. Among the viands, I spied anticuchos, the premiere street food of Lima: hefty batons of charcoal-grilled beef heart. They'd been extensively marinated, and as they cooked, the griller wielded a knife, cutting cross hatches on the surface to multiply the amount of smoke the meat could absorb, and to speed the completion of the kebabs. The brochettes turn out tender and chewy at the same time, with a taste somewhere between sirloin and a glass of blood. And the Peruvians go crazy for them. Captain Beefheart would approve!

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The beef-heart brochettes sizzle over charcoal, offered three to a plate with a choclo (segment of a corn cob with outsize white kernels) and a hunk of potato.

Continue onward for more pix from the picnic.

​I earlier described how the word "tripe" is a flag of convenience for several types of organ meats, and that, encountering it on a menu, you can never be quite sure what you're going to get. Most commonly, the word connotes honeycomb tripe, the well-washed stomach of a cow, which has a glistening white appearance when properly prepped.

It can be used, for example, to mean the small intestine of a pig, which is also known in English as "chitterlings," or, in African-American dialect, "chittlins." Mexicans are very fond of chittlins, too, and they used the term "tripas" to described them. So, while you may expect honeycomb tripe when you order the tripas taco at your local taco truck, what you're going to get is rubbery, thin-bore porcine intestines, heavily sauced. If you want honeycomb tripe, order mondongo, a term that refers both to a soup and to its main ingredient.

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The small intestines of pigs form the basis of this Mexico-City-style tripas taquito.

View plenty more organs here.

Duck feet look like the fingers of extra-terrestrials--imperially thin, chalk white, and moist. French cooks use feet to fortify stocks and give them a near-gluey texture. Asian cooks know the goodness of the organ itself, or shall we call the appendages by their more proper term of variety meats? Duck feet can be poached in boiling water, then pickled in a ginger-laced vinegar; they can be stuffed with pork fat and turnips and roasted; they can be braised with rice wine and soy sauce. When deboned, duck feet are sometimes called webs, and, when used in southern Chinese recipes, are often served stuffed or braised in casseroles.

Duck webs are available, cooked in a clay pot with abalone, at Golden Unicorn, 18 East Broadway, 212-941-0911

Click! Dogpile of duck feet. 

Tripe turns out to be a rather ambiguous term in English. The foremost meaning, as far as Fork in the Road is concerned, is the stomach lining of a cow, which is also known sometimes as honeycomb tripe, due to the texture of its surface, which is crosshatched in a way that makes it look like a beehive. But tripe can also mean the small intestine of the cow, pig, or other farm animal, known to African-Americans as chitterlings. Finally, the broader meaning of the word "tripe" in English is "something poor, worthless, or offensive," a metaphor that shows the outsider status conferred by the consumption of organs and other so-called variety meats.

Prepared properly, beef tripe is washed exhaustively, giving it a glowing, near-white appearance. This erases traces of the stomach acid that can give improperly washed tripe an off-flavor. Some of the best tripe we've had lately is found in the Latin American soup called mondongo. At Puerto Rican old-timer La Taza de Oro ("The Golden Cup"), the mondongo incorporates bits of potato, orange pumpkin, and cilantro, and it's amazingly tasty. At $3.75 for a small bowl, the dense soup is often recommended as a hangover remedy. 96 Eighth Avenue, 212-243-9946

Delicious mondongo is a great deal at La Taza de Oro, and a hangover remedy, to boot.

Our friend and far-flung correspondent (and former Gourmet food editor) Lillian Chou picked up and moved from Jersey City to Beijing in February, and you can read about her exploits in the blog Chinagirl. Periodically, she sends us pictures from behind the Bamboo Curtain.

She posts these photos from Kashkar, a desert oasis in remote Xinjiang, where the Turkic group called the Uighurs live. (Their food can be found in Brighton Beach at Cafe Kashkar.)

At left is a pile of sheep's intestines, both large and small, which have been stuffed with a grain-laden forcemeat. Below is a pile of lamb feet, or trotters, which have been dried. They will provide the gluey broth for a rich stew. Another popular variety meat from the lamb is the tail fat, which is made into kebabs, also used between pieces of tough meat on kebabs to make them more tender.

(photos copyright Lillian Chou)

The wonderful calves liver at Rudar Soccer Club

In some ways, liver is the easiest organ meat to take: mild in flavor, minerally, and loamy. Cooked rapidly in a skillet, it develops a pleasing caramelized surface, while remaining faintly pink in the middle. The Venetians learned how to cook it with butter and onions, which add a sweetness to the organ, while the nearby Istrians sautee it plain, and then sprinkle on a salty scallion sauce, as in the picture above. Hunan cooks wok-fry it with black mushrooms and soy sauce, making it darker and more flavorful, then deglaze it with rice wine. Ethiopian Copts cook kidneys with the liver, adding ginger, butter, red pepper, black pepper, and something called "false cardamom," while Finns make it into a sweet rice pudding, flavored with molasses, raisins, marjoram, and onions. Try feeding that to your kids.

for more organs, click here