In keeping with November's whole beast, nose-to-tail theme revolving around Fergus Henderson's influential restaurant, St. John, we've sourced ingredients and cooked a dinner party wholly from Henderson's epicurean classic, Nose to Tail Eating, A Kind Of British Cooking.

The book's focus - fresh and seasonal ingredients, and using the whole beast - is a noble one, even if detractors of offal eating label nose-to-tail a middle class affectation; peasants with Agas.

On paper, Nose-To-Tail's abhorrence of 'cheffing up' - complicated sauces, foams and jus are mercifully lacking - should translate to a minimum of last-minute prep and a calmer start to the evening, and the ingredients - beyond a few cuts, and harder to find herbs, are straightforward. And it all looks quite thrifty - none of the ingredients stood out as luxurious (unless you tally the ruling class association with game) - it's unlikely baked treacle pudding will push anyone into the red. What we didn't quite factor in were the many hours of cooking and schlepping to source ingredients. It might be a simpler kind of cooking, but to get it on the table required loads of work.

The list of ingredients that aren't found in your average supermarket calls for pigs' tails, trotters, tripe, pheasants, ox tongue, borage and sorrel. The rest we'll pick up at Waitrose.

Sourcing
We started with the pig bits - The Ginger Pig at Borough Market obliged - the number of tails were limited to how many pigs they got in that week - so ended up with seven tails and 8 trotters. No tripe, and pigs' ears, another favoured Hendersonian off-cut, were only available if the heads hadn't gone. Bill: 8 trotters, £4, tails, gratis.

Borough on a Thursday was bustling with tourists (guide: "This is not a farmers' market; it's a real, functioning wholesale place most of the week"), Mark Hix was being shadowed by a camera crew at Shell Seekers, and Jun Tanaka cooked pork faggots outside Brindisa's charcutería, holding a caul up for the camera. Surely offal's in.

Hunting down the pheasants should have been easier than the borage and sorrel: game's in season and Steve Hatt was expected to have them on the day, dressed and oven ready. Instead there's a handwritten sign: "Pheasants no good, avoid pheasants this weekend." They blame the unseasonable warmth: the worst thing for pheasants when they're shot is warm, damp weather. Mallards, partridges and pigeons were available, so we made a quick guess and substitution. Bill: 1 mallard, 2 partridges, 1 pigeon, £16.38.

Finally - keeping in mind that offal fades quickly - to M. Moen & Sons, a classic butchers shop on Clapham Common. Tripe's in the bag. Bill: 2.05kg tripe, £11.17, which seemed quite expensive. Over the past few years there's been a steady rise in prices of non-prime cuts and offal; try getting cheap onglet these days.

30 hours to dinner
The ox tongue and remaining ingredients were sourced from Waitrose, which has increased the availability of unusual cuts for supermarket shoppers with its 'Forgotten Cuts' range. We saw feather steak, lamb shoulder shanks, and pork hock, and they're  adding classics like faggots and Bath chaps to the range shortly. A positive hint at an improvement of seasonality in the supermarket  was the veg - British: celery ("Autumn fenland celery"), parsley, Brussels sprouts, East Anglia leeks and chicory. Bill, £63.93.

After a few photographs of the assembled ingredients, we get started. The tongue's ready to go for the ox tongue and bread salad. It's big and comes brined. Into the pot, with stock veg and peppercorns for about 2 hours on a gentle simmer after an initial rapid boil. To be peeled and sliced before the meal and mixed with white bread cubes soaking up green sauce, Henderson's marvelous all-purpose companion that could be used with almost any meat, fish or fowl. He should bottle it.

Trotters - for the jellied tripe and pheasant and pig's trotter pie
Reports are that pigs' trotters have made a comeback, with Pierre Kauffman's pop-up on the Selfridges roof went through a month's worth of this 'fifth quarter' in under a week. Close up, though, they're slightly devilish: an all too human shade of pink, very cloven. They provide excellent stocky gelatin to proceedings, once hair has been shaved (didn't work too well), then singed off with a kitchen blowtorch.

Happy feet
Once happily nestled between celery and red onions, garlic, bay leaves, carrots, red wine and stock for the game bird and trotter pie (3 hours), we got the rest of the trotters ready for the tripe jelly, then moved on to the crispy pigs' tails and their 3 hours in a medium oven.

Cooking times and lack of oven space adding up. After cooking the trotters have taken on the colour of the wine and smell delicious, though the job of picking the flesh and skin from the bones takes a whole episode of Have I Got News For You.

Taking stock
Once the tripe and trotter flesh (we'll say it again: removing flesh from trotters a singularly time-consuming chore) are done and well combined with the tomatoey veg, it all goes into a lined terrine mould - the tripe, trotter flesh and veg in stock - then into the fridge to set overnight.

Last dish of the day
The birds come out of oven ready to be picked clean in the morning for the pie. They smell fantastic, and manage, for a moment while they cool, to snuff out the lingering smell of tripe boiling in cider. The first day of cooking is over.

Perfect pudding
The baked treacle pudding is a simple, steadying and reliable dish. Despite being served after a long and heavy meal, it received lashings of cream and gushing praise. Not much to report beyond that, really - a fine pud.

Dishing it up
As guests arrived, the crispy pigs' tails were crumbed-up and into the oven. The jellied tripe certainly looks the part, surrounded by its chicory salad dressed with Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, olive oil and capers, the tongue, but it received mixed reviews: one guest, originally from Luxembourg, reminisced about (a tastier) tripe dish of her mother's, a few of the more inebriated tucked in, but there was a definite lack of enthusiasm with mutterings about boarding school, even though schools probably haven't served tripe for decades.

The crispy pigs' tails were delicious. Served with the recommended malt vinegar, and once everyone had abandoned cutlery, we were gnawing into the fatty, crispy morsels, leaving nothing but the little spinal rumps.

The ox tongue and bread salad was a quieter triumph, but managed to convert a few wrinkled noses to the deliciously fatty tongue - easily the most approachable of the 'variety meats', both to deal with and on the, ah, palate. A delicious, slightly fatty meat most encouragingly like corned beef.

Washing up

Leftovers consisted mostly of the jellied tripe and remnants of pie (though for a group that big, we'd recommend baking an extra suet crust to assist mopping up). The meal was thoroughly enjoyed, but its production - with all the attendant theatre of dealing with the offal and off-cuts - was exhausting.

Pros: generally pre-prepared - critical last-minute serving becomes a plate/salad/out-of-oven affair. And delicious, mostly. Best washed  down with a few of Olly Smith's gutsy reds. And of course, there's a refreshingly thrifty angle to all this: the tails were free, the ingredients list being mercifully short and the protein was hardly in the aged entrecôte bracket. We did buy the meat from some of the best suppliers in London, which pushed up the price, (if you're buying offal and game in particular, you should be confident of its provenance).

Cons: mostly pre-prepared - it had to be as everything takes so long, with average cooking times in the 2+ hours bracket. This, of course, is more to do with our choice of menu than Nose-To-Tail's preoccupation with lengthy cooking times. So choose wisely, mix up your recipes from different sources (try these from Taste Club); or leave it to the professionals with their industrial ovens and excellent relationships with specialist butchers and bijou farms.

There was a streak of satisfaction in the labour, though, the honing and reshaping of elemental ingredients and return to ancestral eating habits. Those 'wasted cuts', properly cooked, can be delicious, homely, and given the memories of distant meals these dishes evoked, even nostalgic feasts.