Offal

We brought the olaid to Italy once. She always wanted to go there. The olman had been there in the war. There and North Africa. She wanted to go somewhere that had been a big part of his life. But she didn’t want to go to the desert. We piled into the VW. She played with Anna in the back. Read stories out loud. Nothing was a problem.

Every night she’d eat spaghetti bolognese. ‘Ah ken ah kin eat that. Ken fit it is.’

But when we were in Sienna, we found a trattoria with white painted roughcast on the inside. I asked what the local thing was and the guy said tripe. We ordered one portion of lamb’s liver with sage and one tripe, to share. I asked the olaid if she wanted spagbol again. ‘Did he say tripe?’ she asked.

I said, ‘Aye, but it won’t be like you know it, with milk and onions.’

‘Ah dinna care fits aboot it, if it’s tripe ah can eat it,’ she said.

She ordered another Tripe Sienna. It came in a tomato and herb sauce. She ate every bit and took her bread to the plate after.

The liver was seared outside. The sage was fresh, of course, and the flavour went right through the rare organ. It was the best I’ve tasted and I’ve tried to cook it like that ever since.

In the past few years I’ve thought back to that liver. Or rather to different dishes of liver and other sights of liver.

You know we eat fish livers, here on Lewis, but that’s something different. I’m talking only about meat now.

There was the time I bought a wedder from one of my watchmates. But the deal was you had to be there at the killing. It was all done on trestles. A fellow came round. He was the man. He did everyone’s. You gave him some chops or another nice cut. I don’t think it was illegal then.

My thinking was, this has got to be better than loading the animal into a trailer. Driving miles to town. Then it’s waiting in a pen smelling what it’s smelling and hearing what it’s hearing.

Instead, you get the village expert round. I thought back to Angus, come across the loch by boat to preside over the deed in the shed at Griomsiadair. I’d thought of asking him along on the Italian job. Himself and Ruaraidh would have been company for herself. And entertainment for wee Anna. Then there would have been a vermouth or a last cup of tea, after the wee one had turned her last page of the day.

They would have memories. It might be time to talk about past events. But Ruaraidh wasn’t keeping that great. We’d left it too late.

This time the man who was not Angus, but was like him in some ways, said, ‘Well, you boys should know about knots.’ That was a mistake. I think I went for a clove hitch with a locking turn. But see that moment when the animal struggles. The panic should only be for seconds. But that puts a jerking strain on a tie. Mine did not hold up to that test. He did the proper lashing himself then.

This time there was no mistake. There was just a tiny twist of a small sharp blade, a pocket knife really. Its eyes just glazed over and I remembered my job was to hold the basin close. Everything was clean with a trace of bleach. Someone else poured some salt in the basin and you had to keep stirring, all the time, as it filled. Otherwise the blood would congeal.

He showed us the bits we had to scrub to contain the marag. Black pudding. Then we left the carcass there to hang for a while and went home with the blood and offal.

Gabriele opened the Mrs Beeton edition, provided by my olaid, of course. I said, no, never, but sure enough, there was a recipe for haggis. So we made black puddings and we made our own haggis. I chopped the heart, kidneys and liver. There was a description of how to drain the fluid off the lungs so you could use them too but that sounded a bit much.

The hardest bit was scrubbing the doosh – the stomach that would contain the pudding. I remembered they used to take these to the shore and do them in the salt water. I remembered having to go to the slaughterhouse to get one for a relation so that proved you could do the job at home too, in Westview Terrace.

We did it and everything worked out.