The Economics of Eating A Lamb's Head

I can't think of a better bookend for this offal year. I've beat this dead horse enough (dead horse by the way, coming to your kitchen table soon thanks to H2112), but my pallet has grown tremendously over the past year. I don't know if eating fall-off constitutes "refinement", but I'll pretend it does. My lists of "weird shit I've eaten" and "weird shit I've cooked" have grown in lockstep, one-for-one. A lot of the dishes I've prepared have come from paleo/primal blogs, but a great number of them are my own creations. Moving forward, I would like to develop my general culinary skills beyond "put in crockpot, take out of crockpot, eat." Fortunately, my New Year's Eve meal required a bit more work than that.

A few weeks ago, I bought an entire frozen lamb head for $3.49 at Jungle Jim's near Cincinnati. Cheeks, tongue, brain, and eyeballs. I give the price here for two reasons, both overtly economic. The first is the cost to the consumer (me). I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I could and probably will live most of my adult life on offal. The organs are consistently among the cheapest cuts of any conventional meat I've come across. I imagine the disgust factor and historical stereotype of being lower class keeps the price of the throwaways low. Demand is high enough to

put it on the shelf, but not enough to drive up prices. Let's not kid ourselves here: if a cow's tongue was $8 a pound, guisado de lengua wouldn't be on my menu. When I'm a struggling grad student or entry level punk, a pot of onion-and-ham-bone soup ($5-7) is going to sound pretty

damn appetizing.

The second economic aspect of tree-fiddy lamb head that got my wannabee wonk brain working was the supply side of that price tag. Meat animals are not bred and slaughtered for their organs, excepting ducks and their fatty livers (I've never had foie gras, but its one of the more

mainstream offals.) We fatten up our pigs for their big fatty ribs, not their delicious hearts, and chickens for their plump breasts, not their, well, delicious hearts. So there isn't much cost going into "preparing" the raw offal cuts.

But I still don't understand how costs can be so low. The supply of these bits is inherently restricted: no matter how far we advance animal husbandry techniques, each lamb will only have one head. So, the producer has to not only pay an employee to separate this stuff from the carcass, presumably in a large dirty factory, in front of a hot, bloody conveyor belt emptying into cartoonish barrels labeled "heads", "hooves", etc.

Lets say a human being isn't actually doing the separating, that still requires that the company purchase a machine that has been specifically designed to separate the different parts of offal. Some engineer somewhere pays their bills by designing animal evisceration contraptions, adding yet another level of complexity to the economics of eating a lamb head.

Once the head is gathered, it has to be cleaned ($), frozen ($), packaged ($), labeled ($), shipped ($), and shelved ($). And somehow, all of that amounts to less than four bucks. What is the profit margin on a lamb head? Maybe I'm making too much out of this; they wouldn't being selling head if it wasn't a profitable venture. I imagine they make up for any potential losses with the

insane mark up of regular lamb meat ($15-25/lbs for quality cuts). Still, its pretty interesting t

o consider that I'm eating most of the sensory organs and the center of the nervous system of another planet sharing organism for less than the cost of a shitty deathcore album.

Anyway, on to the actual vittles. I found this recipe and decided to keep it simple. I don't like to be adventurous on my first time working with a certain dish, because I really like to explore the meat for its own worth. I started by grilled some white onions with EVOO, and tossed in a can of no-salt-added tomato sauce, a few sprigs of fresh thyme, clove of garlic, celery greens, and some peppercorns. After gently setting the head into the pot, I drowned her in a bottle of cheap-o Cabernet Sauvignon. Brought it to a boil, and set in the oven at 350 F (USA! USA!).

After three hours and two flips, she was ready to come out. I carefully lifted the now maroon head out of the pot and let the wine reduce while I got to work. The cheek meat was literally falling off the bone, and the jaw fell easily out of socket. The tongue required a bit of pulling, but the eyeballs slid effortlessly out. A hammer and towel shield made short work of the skull. I won't get into it much here, because I need more time to digest, but there is something primeval about smashing your way to brains. I know that conjures up the specters of Lizzy Borden andVarg Vickernes, but it really shouldn't.

The fact that smashing a lamb skull made me feel more like a murderer than a Homo sapien is a testament to how far removed we are from nature. We have delegated the hunting, gathering,

harvesting, and preparation of our food to farmers, butchers, and chefs. I didn't have to birth, name or earmark, slaughter, clean, or really process this piece of meat. And I still felt a little grossed out gingerly digging at the plate sutures with a knife.

I digress...I strained out the chunks and bone fragments from the reduced broth (saving the

larger bone fragments for a broth down the road). I then returned the meat to the liquid, adding in some chopped carrots, celery, onions, and tomatoes. An hour later, and it was ready to pour. Next time, I won't use an entire bottle of wine because it definitely over powered the delicate lamb meat. I've read that lamb in general is a vehicle to express other flavors, and I didn't incorporate that logic into this dish. The meat itself is pretty greasy, which I remember being true with the only other lamb dish I've had (a fantastic tenderloin at The Happy Greek in Columbus.) I had had pork brain once before, and found it pretty bland, so I was unpleasantly surprised to find the lamb counterpart to be very salty. For some reason it reminded me of crawfish, which isn't itself unappealing, but was definitely unexpected.

The eyeball had a consistency akin to the gelatinous/collagen of pig trotters. Pork collagen,

however, doesn't taste good. The lamb eyeball served its vehicle purpose well, lacking any real distinguishable taste. I think the tough membranes of the eye kept out the wine, so a dab of Louisiana hot sauce did the trick. ;)

All in all, I enjoyed this dish. I always like fatty broths, and the gross out factor and fun of preparation really made this recipe a treat. The red wine was a bit too strong for the delicate meat, but I guess that's the take away from this experience. I'm definitely going to try lamb head again, and for $3.50, there's no good reason not to.