Testing out the Trotters

Offal: the parts of an animal butchered that are unfit for use (Webster).

What a great start.

The past few weeks we’ve been collecting our offal from the abattoir. It comes in a plastic bag within a plastic bag: ears, trotters, tails, cheeks, and jowls all together. The tails still have the fluffy whip-like bits on the end of them and the ears are old-man hairy. Our red dirt is still between their toes.

I feel an obligation to at least try all the parts. It must go back to the single brussels sprout Mum used to put on my plate. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, even if it involves stuffing it in our mouths and chewing really fast. If an animal has to die for us to eat meat we’ve got to make the most of it.

The trotters felt a bit like a dead person’s hand. Cold and clammy, bloodless. I ran some hot water and with a sharp knife scraped away the dirt and callused skin. I got a lighter and singed the black hairs…although it didn’t really work, so I pulled them out by hand.

The recipe I found on the net “Chinese-style pigs’ trotters” (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of course) asked me to brown the trotters in a pan. If someone had walked in the door and sniffed they would have thought I was cooking up brawn for dogs. But I was determined.

I added apple juice, soy sauce, caster sugar, chillies, garlic and ginger, then put it all in the crock pot for eight hours.

When I came home that night I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even spoon out the sauce to try. I told myself it would be better in the morning after it’d had time to sit, anyway. I did notice that the trotters didn’t look like trotters anymore. A good sign.

Day two: couldn’t face it for breakfast, so put the pot in the fridge (a chance for the fat to rise and set). But throughout the day, I worked on convincing myself I had a wonderful meal waiting for me at night.

I picked pak choi, snow peas and coriander from the garden and cooked noodles. Then I heated up the trotters and put it all together. It was a bit like an Asian soup, with lots of bones and bits of skin. I didn’t come across any hooves or claws. I did find a couple of tiny slivers of meat, two for each trotter.

The end product was no where near as traumatic to eat as it was to prepare. And I think I would happily serve it up as an entrée for visitors, it was pretty rich as a main meal. They just might not find out exactly where the meat came from till after the washing up.