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Went out shopping today, exploring LIDL and found a frozen pack of faggots. Bought, cooked them exactly to the instructions and had for tea tonight: what a disappointment!
I - we - believe in nose-to-tail eating, lived in Bristol 5 years, I actually worked nights in the Brains factory one year for a summer job and SWMBO suggested trying them so we picked them up for old times' sake.
Doubt set in when we got home and read the small print: 62% gravy, of the remaining "meat" only 15% was liver, some was pork rind (no problem with that) and 4% was pork meat.
Luckily I had liver gravy in the freezer, plus small tubs of cooked liver saved for the cat... she will have to go without that now! The "faggots" were fluffy insubstantial things and it's a good job we had the liver available to go with it.

We usually avoid this sort of food (apart from frozen battered fish bits and similar,) so that is a lesson re-learned. Like I have a commercial burger every 2 or 3 years just to remind me how bad they are!
Avoid!
A

My mum never tires of telling me how when she was a young girl they would eat brains on toast for dinner.
I've always enjoyed liver if it's cooked nicely, and tripe on occasion. And when I visited Japan I ate a whole array of unpleasant bits of animals and enjoyed it (mostly).

The most difficult bit of "poverty food" I've ever experienced though was the Icelandic fermented shark. Oh my gosh, that is something else. No wonder they serve it with a bottle of schnapps.

But absolutely, it is ethically, morally and economically sound to eat as much of a reared animal as is safe to do so. And actually there are some interesting tastes and textures to discover too.

The only faggots I’ve eaten have been from the local butcher - here, they’re excellent. Only ‘negative’, they’re too big. One (£1) is almost enough for two. Very liver’y, makes them himself. Lovely.

Before that, was when I was a kid - remember going into town with my Mum and as a treat, could have a Savoury Duck hot from the oven - tuppence . Delightful.

The butcher was one of 5 in the town (pop circa 15000) and only made Savoury Ducks on a Tuesday. One of two that had the ‘slaughter house’ at the end of the yard.

Not sure I would have chanced a mass produced offering.

It is a pity that we have lost our collective appetite for offal.

Care to disclose what "savoury duck" actually was?!

SE Cheshire/NW Staffs term for a faggot. And it’s pronounced Saa-vourie (if that’s the best way of phoeneticising it) rather than the conventional way of pronouncing savoury.

staffs - now you’ve got me from faggots to Staffordshire oat cakes with grilled cheese and a rasher of salty bacon in the middle Food of the Gods ! and no doubt quite a few potters of bygone times!

Moxi

Oatcakes - now you’re talking And it wasn’t just Staffs - there were a few Oatcake and Pikelet bakery’s in SE Cheshire too.

We still have packs of oatcakes in some of the supermarkets round here (S Cheshire) and I think the last "shop" in the Potteries selling them out of the front room window of a house only closed a few years ago.

I have never had brains (no comments please!) but would be up for eating some if I saw them - one? - on sale. Where I grew up (small town in the Chilterns in the 50s) there was a livestock market which we used to get taken to in the school holidays (I think by my grandma when she was visiting, she had lived in rural Devon) and 2 butchers who killed their own animals.

The one we went to (because it was closest) had things like pigs' tails (my dad grew up in a cooked meat shop and liked them) which were just grilled and gnawed - basically a stick of crackling! Their slaughterhouse was up the side-road from the shop - by my infants school.
The other one was on the main road and I remember once seeing (through the gates) 2 men sticking a pig in the yard by their shop.

I like offal, but I don't think I have had sweatbreads (thymus?) or testicles. Haggis is excellent, as is Devonshire Hogs' pudding - both using the "pluck" (lungs and stuff,) although I don't think either has liver in.
Yum!
A

As a child, a visit to the Butchers was like an anatomy lesson - all the innards - Hodge and Chitterlings (pig small intestine and stomach) were a local ‘delicacy’, tripe, trotters, Brawn, the whole head etc.

Is the product presented on a polystyrene tray perceived as coming from an animal ?

The local Butcher is about 50 yards from the primary school entrance. He has been asked to not have a delivery of carcasses when the little darlings are leaving school !

He can still obtain whatever offal you desire, but it’s ordered in from the abattoir, where the initial processing is now carried out.

His new ‘toy’ is a dry ageing cabinet. On Mother’s Day, while the girls went out for afternoon tea, we boys had a 35 day old 2kg T bone, ‘dry aged’ for 21 days. Seared over charcoal, 30 minutes in the wood burning oven, rested for 30 minutes.

Wonderful - fed 5 of us generously.

I kill and eat my own pigs and brains on toast is always the first treat assuming there's any of left after the .243 puts the wee darlings lights out. The kidneys and a bit of fresh liver usually get eaten on the first night too. Head gets made into brawn, skin into cotechino, lungs into faggots. They say you can eat everything on a pig bar the squeak but I've given up on trotters, just fed up of finding them in the bottom of my freezer

Just finished the annual 'pig fest' https://lifeattheendoftheroad.wordpress ... ty-vacant/



There's nothing beats doing it yourself