“Luv, if I had any brains, I wouldn’t be working here.” That from the butcher behind the counter at my favourite meat outlet at Vic Markets. “No mate, impossible to get,” said the bloke at Hagen’s Organic meats. “We can probably get them if you order them a week ahead,” said someone else in a blue-and-white stripey apron behind yet another counter.
My search for nostalgia had hit the wall; the shopping list was screwed up; the plan of attack hastily revised. There would be no brains in white sauce for the challenge issued by Ellie at Kitchen Wench to cook and write about nostalgia-related food.
In fact, it’s nigh on impossible to find lambs brains, any sort of brains, indeed any offal, anywhere these days. I grab at it greedily when I see it on a menu, knowing that it may be some time before it pops up again. (Most recently I’ve grabbed fried brains at Jeremy Strode’s Bistrode in Surry Hills, Greg Malouf’s extraordinary Middle Eastern-inspired lambs’ tongue salad at Mo Mo, and braised five-spice tripe during yum cha in Hong Kong.)
Offal – or variety meats, that hilarious euphemism – was a regular on the table when I was a child (and I’m not that old!). Mum would make pressed ox tongue, delicate little lambs’ tongues in a white sauce with parsley, fried liver, tripe in a tomato sauce with lots of garlic, braised kidneys and, the ultimate in comfort food, those lambs’ brains.
She didn’t shop at a specialty butcher – she didn’t need to, as offal was routinely available in supermarket meat sections then, and I remember pestering her to put it in the shopping cart. It only occurred to me recently that I haven’t seen any sort of offal in a supermarket meat section for some years and in our markets it only appears in the more rustic of stalls, or in those run by Asians. When did it disappear? When did we become so scared of these parts of animals? I do have a theory that it’s a rare person who will enjoy offal if they haven’t grown up with it, but I can’t have been the only one to grow up with it, surely? Does anyone else out there hanker for it?
The fact that offal seems to be facing culinary extinction for anyone but the most committed of food lovers adds to its nostalgia quotient. And on a personal level, it reminds me of my mother’s love, of her wearying, single-minded commitment to making sure that my brother and I ate the most nutritious food she could give us every day. (Takeaway was a rare thing in our house!) Even in adulthood though, offal still reminds me of Mum. There was a bad patch a few years ago and I left work and life stresses behind and fled home to my childhood home to hide. I hadn’t been eating, wasn’t interested. Desperate to get some food into me, Mum cooked me brains in white sauce. It was the first proper meal I had eaten in days. I like to think it set me on the path to recovery.
So Ellie, I really wanted to cook brains for your challenge, although it would have been tough: despite my nonchalance about eating them, it would have been quite another thing to prepare them, skin them and remove their blood vessels for the first time. But never mind, I have turned to kidneys instead, something else that Mum cooked frequently and which we ate on buttery toast for breakfast – with orange juice freshly squeezed by Dad at the side. Now that’s nostalgia.
Devilled Kidneys
(Serves 4 for breakfast)
20 lambs kidneys
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed
1 ½ tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp tomato chutney (preferably homemade)
1 tsp French mustard
2 tbsp water
Sea salt
Freshly ground pepper
½ cup parsley, chopped
Toast
More butter
Soak kidneys in cold, salted water, skin, remove core, then chop in 1.5-2 centimetre pieces. Heat olive oil and butter in a frying pan or saucepan and saute onion until it is soft. Add garlic and saute briefly, before adding kidneys. Cook for five minutes, or until the kidneys start to brown. Add Worcestershire sauce, chutney, mustard and water and cook over a gentle heat for 15 minutes. Season to taste, adding more water if the kidneys are too dry.
Spoon kidneys on to buttered toast and sprinkle with parsley.
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