engleski

The discreet charm of the heads and blood: the destiny of offal and blood dishes in Croatian menus

In the last 50 years, consumption of offal based dishes in Croatia is declining to the point where they are considered mostly gruesome or even inedible. The modern eater of muscle meat does not even want to think about what happens with the bits and pieces of meat left behind. Popular belief is that the meat industry somehow miraculously transforms them to pâtés, sausages, and other meat products of dubious composition, or they become pet food sometimes sold even in butcher shops (usually in the form of dog salami). We will follow the destiny of once popular and even highly valued food in the past 200 hundred years of Croatian cookbooks and food customs written in ethnographic monographs. Old cookbooks and ethnographic studies speak of food culture that was governed by the prerogative of rational household management, where food was never a waste. Beside many dishes from salvaged bread, the use of leftovers, and offal, recipes tell a story of the respect for food that once existed. Once headcheese and aspic dishes were an important part of every festive repast, especially New Year’s dinner, but now they are only a vague memory. The only remaining relic of offal’s allure are tripe, with its almost cult position in Croatian foodie culture.

offal based dishes ; Croatian cookbooks ; ethnographic studies ; food culture

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