Nose-to-Tail

In the immortal words of Scotland’s Bard …

“Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face,

Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!”

Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

As Robert Burns’ words go, these might not, in all honesty, rank with his best. They may not rival the lush romanticism of My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose, the tender humanity of Ode To A Mouse, or the ringing cry for social equality of A Man’s A Man For A’ That. But his serio-comic poem Address to a Haggis will be quoted in all Burns-loving circles on this coming Burns Night, January 25, when admirers of the Ploughman Poet will celebrate the 267^TH anniversary of his birth with a nip (or two) of his beloved Scotch whisky, and a meal of Scotland’s national dish, enthusiastically addressed in the lines above.

Although I am not Scottish myself, I have been an admirer of Burns since I was in my teens, and have long found it sad that because he wrote much of his work in a now-obscure Lowland Scottish dialect, he is these days less celebrated in the English-speaking world than he deserves to be. (Apparently, in Russian translation, he’s something of a hero). So I shall be celebrating with the best of them on the 25^th with a nip (or two) of whisky and a ceremonial reading – maybe not aloud, out of respect for Mr. Los Angeles’ eardrums – of the poem. Most sadly absent from the table, however, will be the haggis itself: although you can buy a watered-down version in America if you really feel you must, the original dish in all its glorious authenticity is banned from sale here because the American food authorities have decreed that its key ingredient of sheep’s lung is unhealthy for human consumption.

Which I think is particularly rich coming from the nation that gave us Cheetos.

I find the attitude of most Americans towards what they delicately call “variety meats” to be puzzling in the extreme. Mr. Los Angeles’ palate in general embraces both the high and the low. He wooed me with perfectly poached salmon, now regularly prepares impeccably al dente pasta, and can grill a steak that would melt the heart of Blackbeard; he also never met an orange-colored snack he didn’t love, is given to frequenting a Los Angeles establishment called Oki’s Dog, whose specialty, he informs me happily, is a giant tortilla stuffed with two hot dogs, laden with pastrami and cheese and wrapped in a cloak of chilli, and once on a road trip emerged from a service station store triumphantly brandishing a substance labeled “cheese-flavored foodstuff,” which he proceeded to consume with gusto. But mention to him a sweetbread and he turns ashen; show him an honest grilled kidney and milady must be assisted to her fainting couch without delay.

Nor is he alone in this – it appears to be a national form of bigotry which I find nothing short of mystifying. Although an omnivore myself (drawing the line, possibly, at Oki-Dogs), I nevertheless acknowledge and fully respect that many people, including close members of my own friends and family, refuse to eat meat at all; I also accept that others are happy with poultry and fish but draw the line at red meat. But I simply do not understand why, if a person is happy to eat one part of an animal, they would balk at consuming another part of the same beast.

“But it’s when you think of what it is that it feels so disgusting,” is the common explanation I am offered. I used to ask people who followed that line of logic why, in that case, they were happy to eat an egg; but that made them look so sad that I couldn’t bear it, so I stopped.

Back in London, we all grew up eating nose-to-tail without a second thought. In my house, liver and onions were a staple, cold sliced tongue the natural accompaniment to a summer salad, steak and kidney pie an occasion for some celebration. Mr. Los Angeles and I have an elegant and food-loving British Indian friend called Raj with whom we have eaten some of the most delicate and intricately-spiced food on the menu at Indian, Chinese, Thai and Malaysian restaurants in London, Los Angeles, and New York. Raj recently remarked to me that one of his favorite meals in the whole wide world was liver, bacon and chips in an East End greasy spoon, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

One of my own preferred dishes when I was young was a triumphantly déclassée variety of meatball, heavy on the liver with a touch of other innards mixed in, which stuck to your ribs on a rainy London day and warmed your insides like your very own internal Heat-N-Glo log. I hadn’t thought of it for a very long time, and had clear forgotten that its sturdy peasant name had now acquired a different meaning, on the crisp spring day when Mr. Los Angeles and I went to eat at a crowded restaurant in New York’s Chinatown, where we sat at a communal table and I ordered a dish with the intriguing name of Lion’s Head, which, to my delight, turned out to be a perfect re-creation of the lovely livery meatball of my youth.

“But this is wonderful!” I cried, I am informed loudly and in my most cut-glass British accent. “I haven’t had a faggot for years!”

Mr. Los Angeles became suddenly fascinated by the life story of the profoundly deaf Taiwanese grandmother sitting to his left.

Sadly, it is growing harder and harder to find variety meats in Los Angeles restaurants. Chicken liver pâté is gradually disappearing from French bistros; sweetbreads are slowly melting from Argentinean menus. Mexican dives which used to offer higado con cebollas by the bushel are lately turning to the more fashionable pollo con mole coloradito instead. For the nose-to-tail-lover, it is becoming a sad and lonely road to walk.

There used to be a restaurant in Beverly Hills called Kate Mantilini’s, a friendly, sprawling place frequented by Hollywood royalty and commoners alike, that served mostly American fare like meatloaf and rotisserie chicken and macaroni cheese. It also served brains. Beautiful, perfectly cooked brains, lightly fried with black butter in the evening, and if you went in at lunch-time, cooked deliciously up into an omelet. I loved Kate Mantilini’s for this most welcome touch of Europe that they brought to their otherwise all-American menu. At least somewhere in Los Angeles, I thought, there was one place where people appreciated the beauty of a brain. It quite made up, I thought, for the rest of the town.

Then one day, I went there and, quite without warning, the brains had disappeared from the menu. Gone, vanished like the lady on Hitchcock’s train, only in this case never to return.

It turned out that there had been precisely two people in the entire city of Los Angeles who had ever ordered the brains on Kate Mantilini’s menu. And when Billy Wilder died, I failed to make the cut for keeping them there.

Hollywood can be cruel.