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Inchpin is an old word for a deer’s sweetbread, which as the name implies, is never eaten as a dessert or toasted and spread with Marmite.
Despite that, it formed an essential part of the average elderly person’s diet for more than 400 years (and was sometimes known as linchpin as a result), only being superseded by offal when the Victorians industrialised the rearing of livestock with the invention of the steam inseminator and the establishment of thousands of cattle mills throughout the West Midlands.
In recent years, inchpin has begun to reappear on the menus of Michelin-starred restaurants, where it is generally referred to as twentyfivemilpin in order to conform to EU harmonisation rules on metrication.