Discomfort Food
It is a cold, rainy and dreary Sunday in New York. Today is the kind of day that makes you want to hide, stay in bed, hibernate. It is not a jolly start to the holiday season. As soon as I type this, I'm going to make myself some hot cocoa. Comforting and warm.
The food I've eaten this weekend had not always been so comfortable. Thursday was headlined, of course, by a large bird. The turkey I prepared was raised on a farm near Syracuse, New York and involved some correspondence between the Mrs. and the farmer as to timing of when said bird would be "processed" (to use the Orwellian term for "killed, plucked and gutted") and shipped to us. We've been getting closer to the meat that we eat having conversations with a farmer at our local market that includes sentences like "We're sending up two more cows and a few pigs next week so we'll have a brisket for you in three weeks" and so forth. Makes one a little more careful in cooking meat because if you waste anything you feel like you had a critter whacked for no reason.
Still, the turkey came out OK, I'll give myself a 7 out of 10 on it with the major flaw being that the meat at the top of the breast was a bit dry due to me not paying full attention to covering the WHOLE breast with foil and also, I think due to insufficient brining time (I guess 7 hours for a 20 pound bird isn't enough). However the bird drippings and innards made excellent gravy, the best I've ever made in fact and the carcass combined with the wing tips and neck have provided me with about four and a half quarts of good stock roughly half of which is simmering as part of a mushroom and onion soup on the stove as I type this.
No, the real moment of discomfort came on Friday as we once again visited the fine Enoteca Maria for dinner. The specials included capuzella, a Sicilian dish. What is it? Well, it's a sheep head. Specifically, it's a sheep head cut in half from nose to neck, filled with breadcrumbs and roasted. That's it. So of course I ordered it. You might think the gooey brainy parts would be the problem but I actually don't mind brains. If they're cooked right they have the consistency of stiff mashed potatoes and no real gamy flavor, just the intense flavor of the animal itself. My moment of discomfort came when I ripped a chewy strip off the lower jaw which revealed the teeth of the beast. I have to say, I did pause for a second when I realized that I was chewing on the gums of the animal but then I remembered what I tell everyone else about eating what in America are atypical bits of animal: If the muscle is good enough for you, the rest of the beast ought to be as well. Eating variety meats is a guilt-free way of being a carnivore in this country. You can always rest assured that nobody is killing Bessie the cow for the tripe. They're after the filet mignon.
So I thought about all of that, and it's fine in theory but it's still a bit disconcerting to have the skull of a beast grinning at you from the plate. I am proud to say that I scraped everything I could out of the skull I was served, but I'm not sure I'd order it again. In part because of the toothsome grin, but also in part because, like whole crab, there's a lot of work involved in extracting not a lot of meat from a skull.
Guess I'll stick to organs in the future.
The food I've eaten this weekend had not always been so comfortable. Thursday was headlined, of course, by a large bird. The turkey I prepared was raised on a farm near Syracuse, New York and involved some correspondence between the Mrs. and the farmer as to timing of when said bird would be "processed" (to use the Orwellian term for "killed, plucked and gutted") and shipped to us. We've been getting closer to the meat that we eat having conversations with a farmer at our local market that includes sentences like "We're sending up two more cows and a few pigs next week so we'll have a brisket for you in three weeks" and so forth. Makes one a little more careful in cooking meat because if you waste anything you feel like you had a critter whacked for no reason.
Still, the turkey came out OK, I'll give myself a 7 out of 10 on it with the major flaw being that the meat at the top of the breast was a bit dry due to me not paying full attention to covering the WHOLE breast with foil and also, I think due to insufficient brining time (I guess 7 hours for a 20 pound bird isn't enough). However the bird drippings and innards made excellent gravy, the best I've ever made in fact and the carcass combined with the wing tips and neck have provided me with about four and a half quarts of good stock roughly half of which is simmering as part of a mushroom and onion soup on the stove as I type this.
No, the real moment of discomfort came on Friday as we once again visited the fine Enoteca Maria for dinner. The specials included capuzella, a Sicilian dish. What is it? Well, it's a sheep head. Specifically, it's a sheep head cut in half from nose to neck, filled with breadcrumbs and roasted. That's it. So of course I ordered it. You might think the gooey brainy parts would be the problem but I actually don't mind brains. If they're cooked right they have the consistency of stiff mashed potatoes and no real gamy flavor, just the intense flavor of the animal itself. My moment of discomfort came when I ripped a chewy strip off the lower jaw which revealed the teeth of the beast. I have to say, I did pause for a second when I realized that I was chewing on the gums of the animal but then I remembered what I tell everyone else about eating what in America are atypical bits of animal: If the muscle is good enough for you, the rest of the beast ought to be as well. Eating variety meats is a guilt-free way of being a carnivore in this country. You can always rest assured that nobody is killing Bessie the cow for the tripe. They're after the filet mignon.
So I thought about all of that, and it's fine in theory but it's still a bit disconcerting to have the skull of a beast grinning at you from the plate. I am proud to say that I scraped everything I could out of the skull I was served, but I'm not sure I'd order it again. In part because of the toothsome grin, but also in part because, like whole crab, there's a lot of work involved in extracting not a lot of meat from a skull.
Guess I'll stick to organs in the future.
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