Americans Are Eating More Brains as Offal Edges Into the Mainstream
Chef Chris Cosentino calls the dish 'This Is Your Brain on Drugs.'
Reprinted from Offal Good. Copyright © 2017 by Chris Cosentino. Photography copyright © 2017 by Michael Harlan Turkell. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC.
When Mario Batali opened his Italian townhouse restaurant Babbo in 1998 in New York, the menu included an array of attention-getting dishes, such as calf’s brain francobolli (small Tuscan ravioli). It was a dish that mixed the total comfort of a beloved pasta with an eat-on-a-dare kind of filling that has the soft texture of scrambled eggs. It became a mainstay on the menu, a favorite of such regulars as writer Jim Harrison.
Batali was not the first chef in America to feature an innards dish to challenge diners. Italian grandmothers—indeed, grandmothers all over the world—have been cooking with non-muscle meats, from tripe to spleen to heads, for centuries. But Batali was one of offal’s highest-profile champions, and he stocked Babbo’s fine-dining menu with adventurous dishes such as beef cheek ravioli and lambs tongue vinaigrette. You could say he helped open the door for innards.