Bull’s balls in a stew. Or better: choesels, a Brussels dish with organ meat. Can you still taste it somewhere?
It requires some abstraction to eat the testicle of a bull, but in a stew with a generous dash of madeira and lambic, this tender piece of meat was easily consumed in the 1930s. Today you can only eat in one place in Brussels. choesels food, but at the time it was an extremely popular dish, especially near slaughterhouses. For this stew you need a lot of organ meat: beef sweetbreads, pancreas, kidneys and of course the choesels or bullshit itself.
The oldest known recipe for this popular delicacy is from Pierre Cordemans from 1890, then an authority in Brussels gastronomy. He wrote it down in it Journal de la Cuisinea culinary weekly from the capital, thus laying the foundation for all later recipes. Choesels refers to both the dish and one of its ingredients.
Cracking verse
There is some uncertainty about what exactly that ingredient is. Were for Cordemans choesels pancreases, but many Brussels residents meant testicles. Choesels would then be derived from ‘chosettes’ or ‘petites choses’, not to mention ‘shits’. Another theory links ‘choesel’ to the word ‘soesel’, which meant sweetbreads, but ‘sweserick’ in early Dutch referred to testicle. Choesels were therefore pancreas or testicles and depending on the stock in the slaughterhouses one or the other was used.
The dish became really popular when the first slaughterhouse in Brussels opened at the Ninoofsepoort in 1842. Fifty years later, the slaughterhouses of Anderlecht were added, which… choesels completely put it on the map. On Thursdays, people gathered in the cafes around the area to eat the stew of offal. It was no coincidence that that choeselevenings one day after the day of slaughter. After all, organ meat had to be brand new. Also reason why choesels At first they were only eaten in winter, due to the lack of refrigerators.
Mad cow disease
But towards the end of the 1930s and certainly after the Second World War, the people of Brussels liked it much less choesels. There were several reasons for this. There was a shortage of the pancreas, which is rich in insulin and was therefore bought up by pharmaceutical companies. They used it as a medicine for diabetics. Moreover, it took a long time choesels and not everyone liked organ meat equally. Mad cow disease in the 1980s delivered the final death blow. Hardly anyone dared to eat organ meat anymore. Since then choesels there only for the absolute enthusiast, who knew where to look.
However, anyone who fancied a bull’s ass or two in recent years was left wanting after the closure of the Viva M’Boma restaurant. You could no longer enjoy this once so popular dish in any Brussels restaurant. A shame, according to chef Thomas van In ‘t Spinnekopke. He therefore recently put the delicacy back on the map, with testicles and without pancreas.
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