Head-to-tail movement offers new opportunities for offal

Over the past decades, the inexpensive offal that I used to buy and cook for my family disappeared from the meat counters, replaced by assorted primal cuts, broken down in the great butchering houses of the Midwest and shipped to California.

Beef heart, tongue, sweetbreads, even veal liver, ceased to appear in mainstream markets. With their passing, I retired some of my favorite recipes.

However, in recent years, with the heightened popularity of whole animal, head-to-tail cookery, and the appearance of artisan butcher shops and butchery classes, there's been a re-emergence of the odd bits of the animal, and I've been inspired to begin cooking them again.

Of course, Incanto's Chris Cosentino has been a pioneer in bringing back the offal to the table, Roland Passot at La Folie never abandoned sweetbreads, and some other French restaurants have always tended to have them on the menu as well. You could always get tacos de lengua at taco trucks and taquerias, along with menudo on the weekends, but it has been trickier to get the high-quality raw ingredients to cook offal at home.

A few months ago, when my daughter, knowing my love of sweetbreads - she was raised on them - brought me two pounds from an artisan butcher shop near her Mission District home, I was inspired.

Shortly thereafter, I ate at George's in La Jolla (San Diego County), where the appetizer menu included pickled tongue with pickled vegetables. How could I resist? When I asked the sous chef why pickled tongue was on his fine dining menu, he explained that as a longtime fan of Mexican street food, it was his take on tacos de lengua.

Finally, during a recent stay in Provence, I persuaded my neighbor to let me be by her side when she made one of my favorite dishes, Proven?al tripe stew. Now I can pass on how to transform ivory slabs of honeycomb tripe into meltingly tender, succulent bits that swim in a thick broth of tomatoes, onion and fennel.

Best of all, artisan butcher shops are proliferating throughout the Bay Area. Near my house near the entrance to the Capay Valley, home of Riverdog Farm, Full Belly Farm, Capay Organics, Good Humus and other organic operations, rancher Fred Manas has opened Manas Ranch Custom Meats (6797 Hwy. 16, Esparto; (530) 787-1740; manasmeats.com). He raises his own beef on pasture, finishes it with a little grain and processes it in his new Department of Agriculture-approved facility.

Now I can buy tongue, tripe, sweetbreads, heart and veal liver. At last, I'm back in the offal business.