We were in a favourite restaurant overlooking the Bay of Biscay in the French Basque country, scoffing juicy mussels and duck fat chips, washed down with a chilled Jurancon Sec, when a text message pinged on my phone.
The invitation shocked me from the get-go: “The day after you arrive [in London] we are having a private ‘Floffal’ lunch with paired wines in the apartment. Three offal courses prepared by chef Flossie Phillips. Is there anything you can’t eat?”
I could vaguely remember a couple of sad encounters with fried brains (not mine) but I decided to keep an open mind. I texted back: “Will anything but offal be served?” “Maybe part of the dessert,” was the answer. I bravely responded: “OK, we’re in. We’ll eat what’s served.”
Although I’m not averse to some organ meats, particularly foie gras (French for fatty liver) and blood sausage, I’ve always associated offal with my parents’ generation. Dad loved his kidneys on toast for breakfast and tripe for dinner, possibly in a nod to the 1940s when eating all of the beast was part of the war effort, and later, when I was a teenaged copy boy at a great metropolitan newspaper, one of my more onerous tasks was to do a lunch run for the news editor and chief of staff to a dingy little café near Sydney’s Central Station where the house specialty was Welsh-style offal balls (mostly heart and liver) known as faggots. In the days before plastic packaging, the faggot juice would seep out of the cardboard tray and make me gag all the way back to Park Street.
While offal, or organ meat, is still consumed in vast quantities all over the world, with many countries renowned for it above almost everything else, such as foie gras in France and haggis in Scotland – unsurprisingly numbers one and two in the most popular offal lists – in Australia and other consumer-crazed countries, like the US in particular, it has been on the nose, so to speak, since about the 1980s.
As the ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live reported in October: “While Australians eat more animal by-products than people in other western countries, many still turn their noses up at the thought of eating offal. However, their numbers might be waning, as there are signs of an offal resurgence, with some butchers saying they are selling out of popular cuts.”
Meanwhile, in the US, Colorado State University’s Innovation Centre last week announced its first annual Offal Party which will present the 2025 Offal Business Plan, aimed at solving “the problems and promise of these undervalued foods”. The problem in Colorado is that so few Americans eat offal, beef producers are either receiving huge bills for sending the guts of the beast to landfill (where it emits methane) or having to pay for storage of organ meat because they can’t sell it as fast as T-bones.
But let’s get back to London, where the morning after our arrival, former art dealer turned butcher/chef Flora “Flossie” Phillips arrived bearing huge pots of food, decorative embellishments and cases of wine before we’d even finished washing the breakfast dishes. A slight, attractive woman with the accent and style of a Sloane Ranger, it is difficult to imagine Flossie with a beast over her shoulder dripping blood onto her striped apron, but fortunately we have a picture!
While she began her hours of prep and cooking, over a cheeky late morning Prosecco, I asked her why she’d left the refined world of art for her current passion. I was so fascinated by her response I forgot to take notes, but she sums it up perfectly on her floffal.com website: “A butcher! Why? Sometimes it’s just a look, or a slight shift in body language or facial expression. You can’t blame people for their human reflexes. We’re all only as able to respond to things based on what we’ve been exposed to, or had the time or means to seek out for ourselves. And, I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t imagine myself as a butcher a year or so ago.
“When I decided I needed to leave my job and previous lifestyle, I was doing so with the intent to ‘build a career out of offal’. I smile to myself as I remember how rather pragmatically I used to state this to people, and how, when they asked why or how, I would reply, I don’t know. But ‘not knowing’ has educated and enabled me in ways I don’t believe would be possible had I been more prepared or equipped.”
Flossie’s commitment has led to her official role as junior butcher at Farm Shop in Mayfair, but her passion for offal has also created a sideline in her Floffal At Home feasts.
She says: “Just getting people to think about offal as a valid meat ingredient, let alone taste it, makes it real and rewarding. But there is something special and heartening about being asked to curate a specific series of dishes for a group of people you have a connection with … an indulgent offal-based dinner party with wine pairings, and as much of a sense of theatre as we can muster.”
And lunch is served!
We start with canapé of pig’s liver paté and brains, pickled watermelon rind, sorrel leaf and pistachio crackers, paired by sommelier Will Smith with Leiner Bitches Brew, a delicious and light sparkling wine from Germany. I’m a bit on the fence with the canapé – the paté is delicious, the brains not so much. But the first course, paired with a Guccione Machado Rosato, a flavoursome Italian rosé, of lamb’s kidney and liver, soy and chilli-roasted beetroot, raspberry, lamb, soy and chill sauce, is more my style. Delicious.
Second course of chicken hearts and gizzards, braised fennel and cannellini beans, paired with a Nightjar Pinot Noir, a delicate but peppery English light red, is a minor triumph of competing tastes, with the pinot the star for mine.
And we finish with a dessert of blackberry and Bay Clafoutis, lavender cream and mint – yum! – paired with Leiner Muskat Love, an aromatic German slightly sweet white.
We’re done! Full as a state school, as they say. Time to relax and chat with the kitchen team over a cleansing ale or three. Our first Floffal feast was hugely fun, instructive, and mostly delicious.
For more about offal and Flora Phillips, visit floffal.com
