Nose-to-tail Cooking

Jews' offaly-good historical repertoire

If you look at food trends, one of the most recent one is food sustainability. Frankly, that’s a legitimate trend that I’m excited for. If you watch cooking shows, chefs are now bragging about their “nose to tail” cooking experience, how they use every part of the animal and every part of the vegetable. In short, sustainability is a new fad born of food waste, climate change and food insecurity, and I’m here for it.

And, if you look at some of the Ashkenazi, Mizrachi and Sephardi canons, Jews have long been the masters of sustainable cooking, largely as a result of poor ingredients, little money, and few resources.

In Rome, Jews were prohibited from purchasing many ingredients, and were left the scraps — sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. For example, they were only allowed to buy fish that was lesser than 3 inches, and sometimes were prohibited from buying anything other than scraps. Jews around the world struggled to make ends meet as poverty increased, and became rather genius and making everything last as long as possible.

I wanted to share with you some of the most delicious dishes from the Jewish history repertoire for your culinary excitement, with a particular focus on offal. Maybe you, too, can bring these long-forgotten recipes into your kitchen. Or not. Many sound pretty damn gross.

Some of the greatest examples:

Ptcha - Calf’s foot jelly. Yes, that’s right, a meat aspic made from boiling 2 calves’ feet for an indeterminate amount of time, with traditional aromatics. When the mixture becomes gelatinous, chop some of those aromatics and put in the bottom of a high-sided dish, pour the broth over, and let set overnight. Cut into squares and serve.

Braised Tongue - Not a specifically Jewish thing! While it made its name in North America in the Lower East Side, many cultures have braised tongues in their culinary repertoire. Unfortunately, the process of cooking it involves peeling it once it’s braised, and that’s a level too far for me. But apparently, if you’re into offal, this is one of the best ones. I’ve been assured that if the tongue part is too gross for you, you can use beef tenderloin in its place, but that defeats the purpose of the cheapness of the off-cuts.

Stuffed Miltz - Yup, stuffed cow spleen. Apparently you get the butcher to scrape out the insides and leave a gaping pocket, which you fill with matzo meal thickened with egg, aromatics, and salt and pepper. Then you simmer in a gravy. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.

Kishke - When I don’t think about what this is, it’s delicious, I’ll admit. A dish born in Eastern Europe and then adopted by the Ashkenazi Jewish community (made with beef instead of pork), it’s beef intestines stuffed with some sort of meal and perhaps meat. I loved loved loved chicken filled with kishke for a long time before I realized what exactly it was I was eating, and now I have more trouble wrapping my head around it. That said, intestinal casings have long been used for sausages and hot dogs, so why is this truly different?

Bull Penis Stew - Good lord, this is a real thing. Apparently in Yemen, Yemenite Jews used to regularly serve bull penis and cow udder soup. Genuinely, this is way too far for me. There isn’t a chance in hell I could look at this, much less eat it. That said, it’s not particular to Yemenite Jews! Apparently in Spain it’s called Caldo de Cardan (also includes the testicles!) and if you can’t get to Yemen anytime soon (the Houthis are not great, but if you want to get sold into slavery, I suggest a visit), you could visit Spain to try it.

Pupik - Animals’ belly buttons. Enough said.

Calf’s head - Yah, in Sephardi and Mizrachi communities it was (and sometimes still is) traditional to serve a calf’s head on Rosh Hashana (head of the year, I guess?). Considering I cannot even handle a whole fish that doesn’t come filleted, thank god I married an Ashkenazi man.

When in Rome … Roman Jewish cuisine has a number of offaly-good specialties. As legend would have it, Jews are the ones who introduced offal to Roman cooking. Jews would roast any number of off-cuts on grills to remove all the blood, before cooking them. Roasted brain, sweetbreads with chickpeas, spleens fried with sage, you name it, the Jews cooked it.

I for one would welcome a Jewish cooking show where contestants were required to cook offal from the Jewish repertoire and make it delicious. If you want to go ahead and rescue some of these recipes, please email me the results. I can’t wait to live vicariously through you.

Any historical recipes I’m missing that you were passed down through the ages? I want to hear about them!

Betayavon!