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to reveal the future, and gamblers who had bet on the results of the football matches felt this practice was worth spending the birds’ black market value. In Europe of late there have been various reports of ritual killings that involve the removal of bodily organs, linked to Yoruba medicine of Nigerian derivation. Such muti practices can involve the removal of ears, heart and genitals, considered to be parts of special potency.
    Television crime dramas, films and suspense novels provide accounts of murder investigations in which the intimate conditions of a corpse’s organs reveal the cause of death. Although we may feel reassured by such apparent certainties, the aura that surrounds the postmortem and the gravitas of the pathologist or CSI investigator has come to assume much of the mystery and charisma of divination. The world-weary doctor holds aloft a slippery organ for the reverential detective to see. She uncovers the secrets of the human body: trauma, overdose, poison, strangulation, disease.
    I leave it to Norman Lewis who, in describing the butchers’ shops of war-torn Naples of the 1940s, captures the respect we may come to feel for offal:
    Their displays of scraps of offal are set out with art, and handled with reverence . . . chickens’ heads . . . a little grey pile of chickens’ intestines in a brightly polished saucer . . . a gizzard . . . calves’ trotters . . . a large piece of windpipe . . . Little queues wait to be served with these delicacies. 12

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Leftovers

    There are many non-culinary uses for offal: as tallow for candles, rendered for soap, in chemical and pharmaceutical applications, in ancient and New Age medicine and so on. The Inuit use seal guts for making underwear and Arctic peoples use the intestines of bears, walruses and sea lions to construct raincoats. 1 They may be practical but can be strangely beautiful, intricately pleated and luminous. Grasses are sewn into the seams so that when the coat is wet the grass swells and the vulnerable seams remain watertight. Some of these coats are designed to be wide at the base so they can be tied across the opening of a kayak to keep the wearer dry during rain or rough seas. The sculptor Mary-Anne Wensley draws on this tradition by using dried pig intestines to construct her ethereal structures. 2
    Today many beauty potions are derived from offal, such as collagen to plump up ageing skin, which leads us to the BBC TV series Absolutely Fabulous (1992), in which the teenaged Saffy is scornful when ageing model Patsy tries out a new beauty cure-all: ‘You look like a haggis with pointed toes. A tight old bladder skin holding together some rotting offal.’
    The Ministry of Food exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2010 displayed a mesh-lined bucket used for preserving eggs in a solution of isinglass. During the Second World War such preserved eggs would have been a welcome alternative to the powdered kind. Dissolved in water, the resulting solution coated the eggs, stopping air from permeating their shells. Unfortunately the process affected the taste of the eggs and the shells could no longer stand up to boiling. Isinglass is made from the swim bladders of fish, and is a form of collagen that was previously used to clarify wine and beer. It is also a specialized form of glue, used in manuscript conservation to repair parchment when mixed with honey or glycerin. It can be a gelling agent in jelly, desserts, confectionery and blancmange. Originally made from Russian sturgeon and thus prohibitively expensive, in 1795 isinglass was successfully obtained from cod and began to be used more widely.

    A specialist tripe shop in Nice, many of which are now permanently closed.
    Goat’s bladder was used for condoms in ancient Rome and pig’s and sheep’s intestines may have been used as such in ancient Egypt. There is evidence that early Chinese condoms, covering only the head of the penis, were made from lamb’s intestines.
    Offal can