The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

I am a reformed picky eater.

I grew up at my grandparents’ house on a hybrid of southern from-scratch cooking and 80s junk food. To my eternal chagrin, I turned my nose up at a lot of the good stuff: black-eyed peas or turnip greens, cooked down with ham hocks; my grandmother’s homemade head cheese; fried corn; salmon croquettes. I used to hide in my room with my face pressed into my pillow while my grandparents cleaned and cooked chitlins. (You still can’t get me near intestines unless they are filled with cured meat.)

My doting grandparents fed us hamburgers and hot dogs, fish sticks and ramen, but watched uncomprehendingly when we stuffed ourselves with pizza. My grandfather thinks anyone who eats pizza is an idiot. “You just paid twenty dollars for some bread,” he says, in disgust.

In retrospect, though, there were a lot of things I would eat. Cornbread, of course. Fried chicken, hot from the cast-iron skillet; bluegill and trout, fried in cornmeal the same day they were caught, with potatoes fried in the leftover oil, little grains of cornmeal embedded in the white flesh. Smothered steak. My family’s own gumbo recipe, prepared with a tomato broth instead of a roux. For Thanksgiving, we had turkey and stuffing with celery and onions, but we never ate pumpkin pie. Instead, my grandmother baked racks of sweet-savory sweet potato pie, still the only pie I bake or eat.

Then there were things it didn’t occur to me to dislike. The chewy giblet gravy I ladled over the celery-onion stuffing. Oxtails, braised until the meat shredded from the bone and even a toddler could chew it. Turkey necks, long-stewed with garlic and onions, best with mashed potatoes.

And how I loved pig’s feet, right out of the refrigerated jar in a vinegary jelly. My grandparents ate them with Ritz crackers, but I didn’t see the point of complicating matters. To me, they were already a perfect food. I liked them so much that, when my grandfather’s Aunt Alberta visited from her Malvern, Arkansas farm, she cooked a batch of pig’s feet for me, from scratch, the way she’d been taught, with canned sauerkraut. (Someone German taught somebody that, a hundred or more years ago, right?).

I didn’t know there was a special name for this class of foods: offal.

According to my mother and her brothers, offal was a much more frequent part of their diet, growing up. My grandparents had six children and one income; in the early days of their marriage, when they had four baby boys back-to-back and lived in Bethlehem Steel housing, my grandmother would cook liver ‘n onions, or kidney, or scramble calves’ brains with eggs. It was cheap and they liked it fine. They were from the South, where, long ago, slaves — like poor people on every habitable continent — were thrown the leftover parts of the pig and the cow, and learned to make something good from it.

Now, in the Bay Area, at least, offal’s become a trendy food, as chefs “reclaim” the foods of their ancestors. San Francisco chef Chris Cosentino, chef-owner of Incanto and owner of salumi purveyor Boccalone, maintains a (great) blog called Offal Good. Incanto serves almost every part of the pig, and thoughtfully, at that.

In the new-old Dogpatch neighborhood — among the now-abandoned shipyards where my grandfather made his first California dollars –  Serpentine serves a wonderful chicken liver with Thai spices and fenugreek. In the Mission, among taquerias selling lengua tacos, Bar Tartine serves a beef marrow appetizer that makes it hard to leave room for the rest of the meal, while Pizzeria Delfina serves a cold tripe plate.

It’s good that chefs are now taking the “whole-hog” approach now — I agree with those who say it respects the animal you’re eating. But people have eaten these foods for centuries, and will continue to long after the fad is over. In the meantime, please don’t tell my grandfather I once ate an unctuous $15 “pig trotter cake” at Incanto.

I can just hear him now: “You paid fifteen dollars for pig’s feet?”