Doggy Bag: Wait, Isn't Offal Supposed to Be Glamorous?
Our favorite morsel from the blogs.![]()
Real meat = real gross: At Civil Eats, Caroline Cummins licks tongue: a thick black specimen from a 1,000-pound steer, all evil and turgid, covered in spiny taste buds. Cummins had gone seriously Omnivore's Dilemma, buying a quarter of a beast, as she says, "hung, butchered, wrapped, and frozen, it filled our entire chest freezer." Funny how the off-the-grid idyll can turn into something so, well, gross. And frozen. She says most of it got ground into Manwich (okay, hamburger). But the tongue: what the hell to do with that?
Read how she conquers it (with advice from Eat Real Festival's Anya Fernald). Turns it into something delicious, if resolutely foreign -- to Americans, anyway. It's a kind of moral lesson. "I was, momentarily, horrified. I mean, I was perfectly willing to butcher and grill three of my chickens, but those were birds. Not mammals. For an instant, I fully understood vegetarianism, on that visceral level where disgust and revulsion congregate." It's so not easy being a virtuous carnivore.






























