The Importance of Offal

Roland Henin taught me how to cook tripe. This was another critical step for me. At La Rive, I had become interested in offal, the innards that were in abundance in the rural Hudson Valley in the early 1980s—brains, kidneys, liver, testicles, stomach, lungs. The owners of La Rive, who were French, loved offal because in France it is cooked beautifully, but it was rarely used in American restaurants at the time.

Not long after I arrived at La Rive, Henin began teaching at the Culinary Institute of America, an hour south of where I was. He visited me occasionally on weekends, and every now and then I’d sit in on one of his classes. When I couldn’t figure something out, or the food didn’t behave the way I thought it would, I could ask Henin, because he was right there.