UPOEA Makes for an Offal Dinner Party
By Kristina Campbell

Over a pint in our local British pub, a few friends and I wondered about the runaway popularity of good old-fashioned liver ‘n onions among the under-40 crowd there. When I grew up, most of us kids actively disliked liver. Years and years later we tried it again and discovered that it had a certain kind of chalky deliciousness. What appeals about rediscovering a food that you once tricked your mother into not having to eat? There’s something tantalizingly rebellious about it.

But rebellion isn’t the end of the story. The appeal of liver now is not unlike the thrill of thrift-store shopping: knowing that something can be new to you, but that its existence in the world in the first place had nothing to do with you. The cute plastic second-hand purse was made for the original person who bought it; the cow met its maker to get at its tenderloin, not its tasty liver.

And liver, we reasoned, was just scratching the surface. There must be scads of other animal parts that don’t end up shrink-wrapped in the meat section of the grocery store. And with this, we gave birth to the idea of The Culinary Exploration of UPOEA: Underused Parts of Everyday Animals.

We all went looking for UPOEA in Vancouver. Turns out, if you ask a Granville Island butcher for something in the UPOEA family, his eyes light up like Willy Wonka contemplating his chocolate fantasy-world. The butcher hustles to the back of the shop, to the special fridge where the cache is kept, and proudly brings out a chilled prize: a beef tongue, for example.

Our first offal dinner party was held a few weeks ago, on a Saturday night. The menu included both “disguised UPOEA” (beef tongue tacos; chicken liver pizza with kalamata olives), and “featured UPOEA” (chicken livers; cow thymus, AKA sweetbreads, on a bed of caramelized onions). I was definitely the weakest stomach link at the party – unlike our hostess, I am not a high school biology teacher, nor do I have a casual taxidermy hobby. But I ate everything on the table and even helped myself to seconds of choice dishes. (Admittedly, it helped that my sister-in-law had called from Iqualiuit that morning, saying her boyfriend had just shot a caribou and that his Inuit-hunter friends were helping him strip the animal of every edible part. Eating a bit of chicken liver seemed elementary in comparison.)

chicken livers!

I can safely say that UPOEA is awesome for your personal growth as an eater. If I can do it, so can you!

Here’s the recipe for holding your own UPOEA dinner party:
1.Find 3-5 willing tasters
2.Tell each person to pick one UPOEA meat and make a dish out of it
3.Pick a host, who will supply salad and beer
4.Get together and serve each dish in succession
5.Don’t announce what the UPOEA is until everyone’s had a taste
6.Congratulate each other on your offal dishes