Photo: Kylecathie.com

'Preserved'
by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton
Kyle Books -- 2009
Buy it on Amazon

As much as the recent glut of home-canning articles, blogs, hardware and bookstore kiosks would have us believe it, man cannot actually live on darling little jams and preciously put-up pickles alone. S'OK -- Messrs Sandler and Acton are here to help you halt the march of time under blankets of aspic, tubs of salt, lashings of booze, heady wood smoke and plain old air.

But if you're like me, you go straight for the pressure-canned tongue.

See what we tested and find out whether the book's worth buying after the jump.

Time Magazine reports, with a soupçon of punny glee, that sales of offal in Great Britain have surged as of late, likely in response to the international economic downturn. Quoth London's Liz Logan:

"Tough economic times have Britons eating their hearts out and swallowing their tongues. Not literally, of course. But offal - or "variety meats," as the food category is euphemistically called in the U.K. - is experiencing a surge in popularity, with sales up 67% over the past five years."

Thing is, even in advance of the pound sterling's plunge, the nose-to-tail herd, helmed by offal stalwarts like Fergus Henderson and River Cottage's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, had been squealing 'bout the culinary benefits of tripe, kidneys, brains, tail, giblets and trotters. Come for the savings, stay for the savoring -- the message seems to have come home to roost.

I posted a while back about my love of grilled chicken hearts, and I'm no stranger to whisking up a batch of giblet gravy, or a neckbone ragout, but I'm hungry for your favorite takes on organ meats. Post 'em in the comments below.

[via: Time]

Thank you to Flickr user vvvanessa for uploading this drool-inducing image to the Slashfood pool.

Giblet gravy recipe after the jump.

From Cooking with Soup (1968), A Campbell's Cookbook

I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.

Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.

Previously - Jellied Bouillon with Frankfurters

The tongue, in addition to being the best way to taste the food we love so much, is one of the most sensitive and perceptive transmitters in the entire body. Scientists at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition are working on a way to take advantage of the sensory capabilities of the tongue for far more than just taste. Using a small plastic strip to connect 144 micro-electrodes to the tongue, information about stationary and moving objects is sent to the wearer from a helmet known as the "Brain Port," which is equipped with small sensors and other equipment to take stock of the environment the wearer is in. In effect, this means that the tongue can allow people to "see" their environment when normal sight isn't possible or convenient, like underwater. Instead of having to read a device like a compass or a sonar machine while diving, a diver can receive directions through his tongue. One diver who was testing the device underwater "likened the feeling on his tongue to Pop Rocks candies," but could easily locate a small object via cues from the device on his tongue. Tests of the technology with blind participants showed that subjects could easily find doors and catch balls.

The scientists foresee military applications for the technology and will be demonstrating it to Navy and Marine Corps divers later this year.

Scientists who research the sense of taste divide people into three categories: nontasters, medium tasters and supertasters. These classifications are based on the perception of a compound known as 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP, for short), which has a bitter taste that is perceptable to some, but not all, people. 25% of people, the nontasters, will register nothing when they taste the compound. To 50% of the population, the medium tasters, PROP will taste bitter, but not overly so. The remaining 25% of people are classified as supertasters and to them, the compound will taste intensely bitter. The classification of "super taster" does not mean that one's sense of taste is superior to another's, but that there is an increased level of sensitivity to various tastes on the tongue.

Supertasters have a much higher density of papillae, the small mushroom-like structures on the tongue that house taste buds, than medium and nontasters. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men are.