Instructions
Our sensitivities about food are, in modern Australia, a little inconsistent. Our shopping habits indicate that we find great joy and fascination in the most bizarrely processed foods, consumables that glow with unnatural colours and taste of nothing the good Lord ever devised – think bubblegum ice cream and virtually every soft drink imaginable. And yet, in the same period, we have abandoned some of the more delicious, creative and healthful parts of a traditional diet.
Specifically, I’m talking about the decline of offal.
Meat was, until the agricultural revolution of the 1950’s, highly prized. Roast chicken was a celebratory family meal on a Sunday night, not scrounged out of a cardboard bucket in drive-thru. More importantly, then whole chicken would be used. Necks made gravy, livers went into the stuffing, and even the gizzards would be roasted in dripping for an elegant accompaniment.
But this as an era when we understood that meat was undeniably carnal, and we respected the effort made by both farmer and fowl to make the meal possible. Heaven forbid that any part would be wasted.
Yet in the intervening sixty years two critical changes have taken place. Meat is now more widely available than ever – a great result for social justice and improved public health. Yet simultaneously our connection to the origins of meat has evaporated. For too many children meat is a product that appears to be grown industrially on foam trays with absorbent pads. It is clinical, precise and soulless.
That said, for great swaths of Australians there is no going back. The days of eating kidney, liver and longue are long passed. But animal flesh does not divide neatly into prime cuts and the unrecognisable. A large amount of fine meat occupies the grey zone between these extremes – we call these the secondary cuts, and they are some of the most delicious meats ever.
In essence, the more an animal uses a muscle the tougher it becomes, yet at the same time it develops more flavour as taste in meat evolves as a response to the production of lactic acid in the muscle fibres. So while eye fillet can be carved like butter, its taste is mild at best. By contrast, the cow’s cheeks have been busily chewing cud non-stop, and within their toughness lies an extraordinary flavour. That flavour has to be teased out, and this can only be done through slow cooking.
So if true offal just isn’t going to fly at your table, than start with those gloriously sticky, rich and unctuous cuts that are ignored too often. Delicious? You bet. What a cheek!
Braised ox cheek with parsley mash