I'm not much of a cook but I do like reading recipes, particularly the ones that include lavish amounts of double cream and dark chocolate.

While other people open a newspaper and read the sports pages, the travel section or the financial columns, I turn to the food and drink supplements and drool.

But not always. This weekend I came across a recipe that began: Take half a pig's head and poach for five hours ...

It was taken from a cookery book specialising in meals made from animals' bits and pieces - the b and p we don't usually associate with the dinner table. Truly a case of one man's meat being another man's offal.

Apart from poached pig's head there were dishes such as rolled pig's spleen (can anyone recommend a good wine to serve with spleen?) crispy pig's ear salad and crunchy pig's tails.

Other creatures were mentioned but, by and large, it seemed to be a bad news day for porkers.

Now it may come as a surprise but this was not the first time I had come across such delicacies.

Some years ago, I travelled with friends through Louisiana, a state in America's deep South, which is definitely not the place to be if you're a vegetarian - or slightly squeamish.

Here the culinary motto was obviously waste not, want not, and local chefs boasted they used every whisker and wrinkle a pig possessed in their dishes. The only parts to escape were their oinks!

In one store I actually came across a jar of pickled pigs' snouts which, you have to admit, makes something of a change from onions and gherkins.

And once, and only once, I was invited to dinner at a very smart and very expensive Sussex hotel.

The menu was a gourmet's delight, as it should have been for the price, but one dish stood out from all the rest. It was a braised pig's trotter.

Now, I was no stranger to pigs' trotters. During my childhood in the wild North country, trotters - slightly greasy and swimming in gravy - would often appear on plates accompanied by mounds of mashed potato.

But I had never seen one south of Watford. What sort of a dish would a five-star restaurant make of a pig's trotter, I wondered. Something along the lines of a silk purse from a sow's ear I presumed.

I had to find out, of course, but my friend didn't. He enjoyed a plateful of juicy venison while I had the trotter - slightly greasy, swimming in gravy and sitting atop a pile of mashed potato.

The restaurant was hushed as the trotter was placed in front of me. There was no turning back.

I ate it, said it was delicious and mentally worked out it had probably cost about £20, taking into account the bill for the rest of the meal.

A few days later, I saw a pile of trotters in a butcher's shop: 25p each and marked down for pet food.

Since then I've stuck to only major animal parts in my diet - chops, steaks and roasts from shoulders, rumps and legs. So, too, has The Mother, who is really a sort of fish-eating vegetarian.

On Monday it was her turn to do the shopping. I carefully made out a list and handed it over.

She read it, frowned, reached for her glasses, and read it again.

"Half a pig's head?" she inquired.

"That's right, just half," I told her. "We don't want to make pigs of ourselves, do we?"