I always believed ’sweetbreads’ was a modern moniker, a name doubtlessly dubbed by a smart butcher who couldn’t get rid of the not-so-little bloody blobs known more correctly as the thymus glands of vealers and lambs. Sex on the cover of a novel is said to guarantee sales, so sexy names to move non- sellers. [...]

Brains used to be the real food of the masses; or more exactly, lambs’ brains and bacon served with a beer at the counter of your local pub. Not these days: all these old-fashioned cuts have become very old-fashioned. The new man, the new woman, have no place in their lives for brains and livers [...]

The French, you will know well, rave about the livers of birds, notably that of the goose, but also that of the duck. Duck livers, too, are really the sort of food which you really have to love to like. There is no middle ground. But to eat them rare is not so much a [...]

1 hare, jointed, fillets removed and kept separate

Trim the fillets as described in the previous recipe.

2 cups red wine

4 waxy potatoes, sliced into quarters

3 carrots, sliced roughly

1 celery stick, sliced roughly

1 clove garlic, sliced finely

1 hot chilli, sliced roughly

1 walnut-sized piece of ginger, sliced finely

water to cover

250g tin of tomatoes

3 teaspoons salt pasta shapes

bunch of [...]

Fine scents and quality foods don’t necessarily marry. Think of the aroma of some of your favourite cheeses. Hardly alluring are they?
Game is the same. The best game looks like something left over from a Rambo movie, all blood and guts, and smells like an untended underarm, wiped clean with a pair of old socks. [...]

Rabbits have never been something to make the mouth water, but they are cheap, readily available, and have a firm place in Australian folklore. For all those reasons, rabbit is something you should have at the table several times a year. There’s another reason jfor that: the longer you cook rabbit, the better you cook [...]

I want to tell you about a disaster. It was pheasant season, and the call had come from my butcher. He had a beautiful brace of birds and he promised to keep them hanging in his cool-room until they were ripe, pluck them, gut them, and present them to me to turn into something special [...]

It was while my little daughter was sliding her umpteenth slice of ox tongue down her tiny throat, like sardines into a pelican’s gob, that I started to wonder what it is in the pickle that helps preserve the tongues, and then makes them go pink when you cook them.

Would she turn pinker if she [...]

Please read this after breakfast.

The question is this: would we all be vegetarians if we had to kill before we cooked? I pose this curler after coming not from a kill, but from a clean.

I had dragged home a couple of squab — necks, heads, beaks and feet attached, feathers removed. Do you have the [...]