Meat, Food, and Farming

Lamb pluck

The Offal

There is more and more talk about the fith quarter which in lay man's terms means Offal. I know I have blogged about this before but but for fear of repeating myself, which my Nana always said was the ony way to get anything through, here is more on Offal.

Lamb Pluck First get your pluck

Untrimmed Lamb Pluck or Offal

When you think about cost, a pluck will cost about £3.00 ish. Ask your butcher, he will be impressed that you even know what it is called. The next stage is to let your kids have a look. They will only be grossed out for a millisecond, then they will want to touch and get involved. Radek did, as you will see on the pic below. What a great way to start anatomy lessons and involve them in eating other foods.

Start the cutting by removing the liver trimming, the white cologen where it was attached to the diaphram. Then remove the white looking pipes etc from the inside. If you cant see them you have it the wrong way up.

Cut of the heart just above the fat.

Seperate the two lung lobes, trim out the pipes by just cutting each lobe into four pices and cut out the pipes as best as you can. It doesn't matter if you don't get them all.

Pluck Trimmed

The trimmed bits of the pluck: liver, heart, lung, heart, sweet bread, diaphram or skirt can all be used separately. Although everything can be minced to make a kind of faggot. When I was a child growing up in lower Furness I knew them as child savory duck, which sounds much better.

The trimmed components of the pluck are also some of the proper constituents of haggis, along with oats, fat and spleen.

Recipe from my 1904 Douglas's Encyclopaedia of meat

ancient-haggis recipe not that different

This haggis recipe could be done with this style of recipe although might need a bit of modernising and some oatmeal and suet fat, preferebly lamb or even better mutton suet fat.

Liver and Sliced ready for cooking

So to the sliced Liver and heart. We all had the heart and liver cooked medium rare, on a flat cast iron griddle, just coated in seasoned flour. And it was fantastic. The heart is like a good lamb steak. The remainder of the pluck is going to make the haggis.