Would You Ever Eat a Tongue Taco?

November 21, 2011

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Theme Essay by Bianca Garcia

Nose-to-Tail Eating: The Food of My Childhood Gets Trendy

In 2002, we had a feast fit for a king. It was in the Philippines, before I moved to the United States, and it was my grandfather’s birthday.

We had all the usual Filipino fare, including kare-kare, a beef stew made with peanut sauce, string beans, cabbage, tender oxtail, chewy tripe, and soft, jiggly, fatty intestines. We had menudo, a tomato-based pork dish made with carrots, potatoes, chickpeas, more tripe, and rich, delicious liver. And we had lengua, soft, braised beef tongue in a thick mushroom sauce.

But the star of the celebration was—nope, not my grandfather—the lechón, or roast suckling pig. Lechón is a whole pig spit-roasted over red-hot coals and stuffed with fragrant tamarind leaves or lemongrass, shallots, garlic, leeks, and pepper.

I love lechón, with its golden brown skin and juicy meat marbled with fat. My aunts and uncles were fighting over the more exclusive parts of the pig—ears, snout, trotters, curly crispy tail—but when I glanced over at the birthday celebrant, I saw that he, like me, was blissfully satisfied with heaping portions of skin and rib meat.

When I recount this story to Filipino friends, their mouths water. But when I tell it to my American friends, they’re grossed out—or, at least, they used to be.

Nine years after that celebratory meal, I see these items—the dishes of my childhood—popping up in menus at the trendiest restaurants in the United States. Nose-to-tail eating, also called head-to-tail eating, is now in vogue. It calls for devouring every part of an animal: tripe, pig tails, calf brains, chicken feet, blood sausage, innards, and more.

In Boston, where I live, one of the city’s most well-known chefs, the dashing Ken Oringer, serves scrumptious tongue tacos at his La Verdad restaurant near Fenway Park. The dish, described in the menu as “benny lengua—braised beef tongue, salsa arbol, cilantro, and red onion,” is so popular that on several occasions when I tried to order it, it was sold out.

Another local star chef, Cambridge-based Tony Maws, is famous for his crispy pig tails at Craigie on Main in Cambridge.

There’s also Julie Powell—author of Julie and Julia, the blog that turned into a book that turned into a movie—who rhapsodizes about pan-fried liver in her latest memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. In a recipe she calls “Valentine’s Day Liver for Two,” Powell claims:

Beef liver cooked like this—I keep telling people in the face of near-universal scoffs of disbelief—is one of the most, well, passionate things you’ll ever eat. I don’t know exactly why this is. It’s as sexy as hell, but difficult too. Somehow faintly forlorn, like there is no denying that something was torn from something for your pleasure.

Beef tongue? Pork hearts? Liver? Suddenly all these exotic parts of the animal are considered chic, ingenuous, tasty, even sexy. But for me, these are…normal. In the Philippines, where I grew up, these items were part of our daily menu.

The Pig Has Arrived

Pork belly is the baby step in nose-to-tail eating. It is essentially bacon, which almost everyone loves, but it is thicker, more tender, and adapts to a lot of savory flavors. While it’s true that many people are repulsed by the idea of eating squishy pork fat, there are also many who embrace it.

In his 2007 article “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate,” Frank Bruni, former food critic of the New York Times, talks about several New York restaurants that were serving fat unapologetically even four years ago. Some of the dishes and restaurants he describes include a pork butt (which, by the way, is a term that refers to the pig’s shoulder and not its actual behind) at Momofuku, a terrine of oxtail and pig’s foot at Trestle on Tenth, and deep- fried pork jowl at Resto.

Bruni also notes that TV personality Chef Mario Batali was offering various organ meats and other fat concoctions on his restaurant menus. In his Manhattan outposts, lardo—a cured strip of pork fat with rosemary and other herbs—appeared on pizza at Otto and on a bruschetta at Babbo.

A few years ago, Batali didn’t have the nerve to call lardo what it is. Instead, he invented the term “prosciutto blanco.” He told Bruni, "I knew they wouldn't eat it if I just said, 'This is the fat of the pig melted onto toast.'''

Nose-to-tail eating is not just about pork belly and fat, though; it’s also about eating different meats from different animals. Scott Gold, who turned his blog The Shameless Carnivore into a book, writes about his experience in an Ecuadorian restaurant in Brooklyn that specializes in serving guinea pig:

Even more so than rabbit, the notion of eating guinea pigs elicits from most Americans a loathing and disgust they’d normally reserve for, say, devoted followers of the Church of Satan, or those perverts nabbed red-handed by Chris Hansen on Dateline’s 'To Catch a Predator.' They may not say it outright (well, some do) but most people, when I tell them I’ve eaten guinea pig, are quick to see me as some kind of sick deviant.

Deviant behavior or not, the thrill of eating something that used to be a cultural taboo is the reason why nose-to-tail eating is growing fast in America. Multicultural Americans are not only going back to their roots through native dishes but are introducing other Americans to it as well. The converts then embrace it, tinker with more recipes, and come up with their own variations of these formerly nontraditional dishes.

How did the chefs at chi-chi restaurants in the city suddenly come up with the idea of serving bone marrow butter with their rib eye steaks? Probably after their Mexican-American friends invited them to a home-cooked meal and introduced them to the slow-braised cuts of beef. Or maybe after their Italian nonnas prepared osso bucco for dinner and instructed them to scoop out the gelatinous filling.

It’s not just Americans with foreign lineage who are introducing nose-to-tail eating to fellow foodies; it’s also world travelers who are eager to bring back a taste of the exotic. In 2007, American journalist and food writer Calvin Trillin traveled to Singapore and became hooked on Southeast Asian cuisine.

In his New Yorker article “Three Chopsticks,” Trillin writes about his Singaporean food adventures, citing local delicacies such as kueh chap, “a bowl of broth with sheets of rice-flour noodles served with pig intestines or ‘spare parts.’” Now he dreams of a hawker center in New York, with stands run by vendors of various ethnicities, selling food from every part of the animal.

Eating Everything, Locally and Expensively

In April 2010, I attended a Boston fundraising event called Chef Louis Night. The event cost $43 per ticket, with donations going to the Haiti Relief Effort.

We had been promised oysters, cocktails, and a “very large pig” from Codman Community Farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Like other attendees, I expected unique and untraditional pork dishes. We were served a prosciutto and strawberry salad, pork sausages and shredded pork with lettuce cups, little pork-belly sandwiches, home fries or potato hash with pancetta, and boiled pork loin—all tasty but not terribly exciting.

One of my friends expressed disappointment that the chefs didn't cook the pig’s head and trotters. “Instead of putting it on display,” she said, “they could have done something delicious with it.”

If this charity dinner event had happened ten years ago, I doubt that the attendees would have expected a pork head terrine or crispy pork skin.

Louie DiBiccari, chef de cuisine of Sel de la Terre restaurant and founder of Chef Louie Night, is known for menus that highlight house-made hams, sausages, pâtés, and terrines. He is also a big proponent of locavore eating. During the event, he discussed the dishes served, peppering each explanation with tidbits about local suppliers and vendors. He emphasized politics rather than the titillating appeal of unfamiliar food.

For famous locavores like Michael Pollan and his well-off devotees, if a local chef—or regular consumer with above-average food prep skills—buys a whole hog from a nearby farm, it makes sense that he should use whatever he can from the animal. It is economical, more nutritious, and better for the environment, Pollan and others argue. Given this politically correct gloss, nose-to-tail eating is a win-win situation for everyone.

That is, if you have the cash to spend on your ideals.

In ABC’s Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, the chef embarks on a monumental campaign to ensure that every child, every family in America, eats “real, honest, wholesome food.”

In a 2010 first-season episode, he tries to make over the lunch menu at a middle school. But instead of the fresh chicken he's planning to roast, the school is sent precooked, heavily breaded, preservative-filled fried chicken. Oliver then meets with local bigwigs to try to raise money for fresh, local ingredients. In addition to helping people make healthier choices, he's faced with a new challenge: how to help people eat locally grown food when they can’t afford it.

In the world of nose-to-tail eating, this translates into the poor foodie’s dilemma: How can you eat headcheese and sweetbread when it’s so expensive?

These leftover parts of the animals used to be junk; chefs threw them away or ground them up for dog food. Now offal, tripe, blood sausage, and the like take center stage as hip menu items. In countries like the Philippines, China, Mexico, Brazil—in fact, in almost every country around the world—these parts are cooked as “poor people’s food” because they're so cheap and readily available.

But in the United States, entrepreneurial chefs are essentially ripping off customers by selling these cheap cuts of meat for premium prices. Then again, their adoring public has proven itself willing to fork over a lot of money for a few bites of sweetbread—a dish made with a young calf’s thymus gland and pancreas.

I’ll Take Calves Brains

I remember a particular dinner a couple of years ago at one of my favorite restaurants: KO Prime in downtown Boston.

Our table decided to be adventurous (and go broke) by ordering the most exotic things on the appetizer menu. We had roasted bone marrow (three giant bones served on top of a beef tongue marmalade, with crispy toast points), calves brains (served as an open-faced sandwich on top of bread, with a creamy sauce), escargot, and a soft-shell crab sandwich, with the crab meant to be eaten whole.

My table companions, who were all Americans, ooohhhed and aaahhhed after tasting each dish.

The calves brains were not a big hit (I ended up eating most of it), but everyone agreed that it tasted like scrambled egg whites. The bone marrow and the beef tongue, however, were clear winners.

“It tastes like butter,” one of my friends swooned, as he spread the marrow on a piece of crusty bread.

“Really fatty butter,” I corrected him, spooning some more of the gelatinous material from the bone. “I used to eat this all the time in the Philippines. But in much bigger quantities.”

It’s true—but when I was a child, food meant more to me than trendy exotica. If I had a cold and wanted to be coddled, my grandfather would make sure I had homemade soup of calves brains, clear broth, and thin vermicelli noodles. I’d fill up on that soup as I filled up on his love. For me, that food was safe and familiar. It was home.

Publishing Information:

“Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate” by Frank Bruni, New York Times, June 13, 2007.
“Three Chopsticks” by Calvin Trillin, New Yorker, September 3, 2007.
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell (Little, Brown and Company, 2009).
Best Food Writing 2008 edited by Holly Hughes (Da Capo Press, 2008).
The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers by Scott Gold (Broadway Books, 2008).
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Season 1, Episode 5, ABC, originally aired April 16, 2010.

Art Information

Bianca Garcia is a social media consultant for Talking Writing. To learn more about her favorite things to eat, see Love, Loss, and Spaghetti in this month’s issue.

This piece first appeared, in a different form, as Nose-to-Tail Eating: A Long Hard Look at the Food Trend Sweeping the U.S. on Bianca’s blog, Confessions of a Chocoholic. It began as an assignment in Martha Nichols's magazine writing class at the Harvard University Extension School.