THE DEVIL TO PAY

 ‘I’m an offal man’ declared Bear Grylls in a headline in the Times on Saturday.  Personally I find this about as interesting and newsworthy as learning what Bear Grylls does in the woods, but that's just me.

I was far more interested, and amused, a couple of years back, to see the picture of him above, eating a frog he killed and cooked in a Bulgarian National Park. Apparently this was illegal and he ‘faced a fine’ though I can’t find any information on whether or not he actually paid one.

 

Having grown up with at least weekly dollops of liver and tripe, massively overcooked my mother who really didn’t care about food, it took me a while to develop the taste for offal when I left home and became a bit of a foodie.

 

Of course I’d read my Ulysses and I was all in favour of eating the inner organs of beasts and fowl, either with relish or preferably with a splash of wine and a squeeze of lemon.

 

But the first time I ate devilled kidneys was in a restaurant in Perth, Western Australia, and I knew I was in a good place because Maggie Fitzgibbon, best remembered (if she’s still remembered at all) as the star of the soap opera The Newcomers, was eating there too.

 

Those Australian devilled kidneys were great - and of course I didn't take a picture because you just didn't in them days, and I’ve tried with varying degrees of success to cook my own, and although I don’t cook a bad devilled kidney I don’t really cook a great one.  Recipes vary, but there’s no great mystery about it – you coat your lamb kidneys in seasoned flour (paprika, cayenne pepper, mustard powder, that kind of thing), then fry them up with Worcestershire sauce, sherry, maybe vinegar, and most often they’re served on a slice of bread or toast.

 

Mine usually taste pretty good but the problem I find is that I think raw lamb kidneys are a thing of exquisite beauty 

 

whereas when they’ve been cooked they can look a bit nothingy.

 

Of course that’s no reason not to eat them, but I do wish I could retain there basic beauty.  Still I can live with it.  Food can be very good without being photogenic.  There is a life outside of Instagram.

    And here are some I made much earlier, in California since you ask.  Devilled kidneys - consistent in at least three continents.

SOME LITERARY KIDNEYS

Even if you know next to nothing about Joyce’s Ulysses there’s a chance you may know the lines, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

To which a reader might ask, “Yes, but what about the external organs?”  Although I suppose (unless we’re discussing testicles) there’s only really one seriously edible external organ and that’s the skin.

Given the flexibility of Bloom’s Jewishness, chances are he wouldn’t have objected too much to eating pork skin.  And even, perhaps especially, observant Jews  are fans of gribenes, chicken or goose skin cracklings.

Anyway, this Joycean literary allusion was in my mind as I made devilled (not grilled) kidneys for Sunday breakfast, loosely following a Fergus Henderson recipe, substituting sherry for chicken stock.  Came out pretty well, I thought.

Had I been cooking them for dinner I would almost certainly have added brandy and made kidneys flambé, but that always brings up another literary allusion: Peter Handke’s The Ride Across Lake Constance.   

I had certainly tasted kidneys before I saw a production of the play, though I’d never had them flambéed.  And now I can never even think of them without summoning up these lines:

Oh and I just found this.  It’s from the Observer, April 2009, and appears in Tom Adams’ interview with Claire Walsh, JG Ballard’s very longtime girlfriend, conducted “just days after his death.”  Was there a rush?

Anyway, Adams writes, “Up until recently, in weeks when his appetite was buoyed by steroid, he (Ballard) would take her up the road to Kristof’s, a regular haunt, and insist she had oysters while he had his favorite devilled kidneys.”  This makes me like Ballard even more than I did already.