First thing in the morning in Kuching, Borneo: a hangover so bad you don’t and can’t even look anyone in the eye so certain are you that you said or did something truly awful after a night of langkau—the local rice whiskey—and (to the best of your recollection) fucking tequila. (And whose great idea was that, anyway?) You’re oblivious to the view of the river, and the sights and smells of morning, focusing only on the chipped white bowl of steaming laksa coming your way—the promise of relief. The smell hits you first as the waiter deposits it in front of you with a clunk you feel in your pineal gland: a rich, fiery, hearty, spicy steam of fish and coconut gravy. You dig in with chopsticks and spoon, slurp your first mouthful of noodles—a powerful hit of sambal grabbing hold of you, exorcising the Evil. Ensuing mouthfuls bring shrimp, cockles, and fish cake…more spicy-sweet gravy…more noodles. It burns. It burns so good. You’re sweating now, the poison leaving your pores, brain kick-starting…something that might just be hope secreting from somewhere in your shriveled, sun-dried, terribly abused cortex.
It’s another one of those agriturismos. They’re all over Italy, little mom-and-pop joints, for the most part thrown up quickly in farmhouses, private homes, on picnic tables under the trees—serving out of hearths, field kitchens. This one’s in Sardinia, and what’s on your plate is the simplest thing in the world: spaghetti alla bottarga—pasta, tossed quickly with local olive oil (through which a clove of garlic and a hot pepper have briefly been dragged) and the local salt-cured mullet eggs, which are the specialty of the region. There’s no explaining why this is so good. It just…is. The salty and frankly fishy flavor of the eggs cuddles up to more subtle taste of the durum pasta—the tiniest notes of heat from the pepper—and the sharp yet lush tang of freshly pressed extra-virgin olive oil. You wash this down with a sneakily compelling Cannonau—the local red whose rough charms have lately got a serious hold on you. You don’t care about the big Bordeauxs anymore. The high-maintenance Burgundies with their complex personalities. The Baron Rothschild could back his car up to the door, trunk full of monster vintages, he’s drunk and offering them for free—and you would decline. Here? Now? Mopping olive oil and a few errant fish eggs from the bottom of your plate, swilling this young and proudly no-name wine, there is nothing you would rather be drinking.
When you ask the proprietor where the wine comes from, he points to an old man sitting in the corner reading a soccer magazine, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
“It came from him,” he says.
The salarymen are getting boisterous in Shinjuku district, their workaday personalities filed away till tomorrow, rapidly being replaced—with every beer, every reciprocally poured sake—with their real personalities. Drunk—they’re loud, friendly, angry, maudlin, horny. Over yakitori—lovingly grilled bits of artisanal chicken bits—you are particularly well placed to observe Japan’s uniquely kooky national schizophrenia. A man with a headband carefully turns skewers of sizzling poultry over glowing charcoal in a metal trough. Someone gives you another beer—an oversized bottle of Sapporo in an undersized glass. The room is filled with smoke from the dripping chicken fat flaring up on the coals, from many cigarettes. You can barely see the men at the tables, sitting or leaning cross-legged in their stocking feet, some of them slumped over, falling to the side, red-faced and sweating. The thick smoke hanging in the air obscures their upper halves. Now and again, one group or another, sitting by a window, will open it for a few minutes and try to air the place out.
You’re sitting at the counter, the wooden cup in front of you bristling with naked, recently gnawed skewers—a hedgehog display of dead soldiers. You’ve had the soft bone (breast cartilage), knee bone, thigh, chicken meatballs dipped in raw quail egg. There have been many orders of chicken hearts; chicken livers; Kobe beef tongue—little, uniformly sized bits impaled neatly on bamboo and slowly turned until perfectly cooked, salty and slightly redolent of the handmade charcoal, garnished with sea salt—or red pepper. You’ve had many skewers of chicken skin—threaded and wrapped tightly around the slivers of bamboo, then slowly grilled until crispy, chewy, and yet still soft in the center. But now it’s all about ass. You got the last six of them and you’re pretty pleased with yourself about that. That fatty protuberance of rich skin, each one containing fatty nubbins of flavorful, buttery meat divided by a thin layer of cartilage—it’s the single best piece of meat and flesh on the chicken. And, of course, there’s only one of them per animal, so supply is limited. The man fighting a losing battle with verticality across from you, his head teetering on one elbow, then sliding down his forearm from time to time, recovering just before his head bounces off the counter—he’s looking at your chicken asses and he’s angry. You don’t know what he’s griping about to the chef—who’s heard it all before—but you suspect that he’s complaining that the lone gaijin in the room got the last pieces of ass. You buy him a sake.
At the deli on Houston Street, they haul the pastrami steaming out of a giant warmer and slice it thickly by hand. It’s moist and so tender you wonder how the guy gets his knife through without mashing it. He piles the dark pink meat between too-fresh rye bread smeared with the bright yellow mustard indigenous to these parts. Later, at the table, the bread gives way, crumbling beneath the weight and wetness of the pastrami. You push the salty, savory flesh around your plate with a wedge of dill pickle, wash it down with a Dr. Brown’s. The salty, peppery, savory, spicy, and sour cut just right by the sweetness of the soda.
Fifty miles out of Prague, the halved carcass of a freshly killed hog hangs, still steaming in the cold, from what looks like a child’s swing set. It’s a wet, drizzling morning and your feet are sopping and you’ve been warming yourself against the chill by huddling around the small fire over which a pot of pig parts boils. The butcher’s family and friends are drinking slivovitz and beer, and though noon is still a few hours off, you’ve had quite a few of both. Someone calls you inside to the tiled workspace, where the butcher has mixed the pig’s blood with cooked onions and spices and crumbs of country bread, and he’s ready to fill the casings. Usually, they slip the casing over a metal tube, turn on the grinding machine, cram in the forcemeat or filling, and the sausages fill like magic. This guy does it differently. He chops everything by hand. A wet mesa of black filling covers his cutting board, barely retaining its shape—yet he grabs the casing in one hand, puts two fingers in one open end, makes the “V” sign, stretching it disturbingly, and reaches with the other—then buries both his hands in the mix. A whirlwind of movement as he squeezes with his right hand, using his palm like a funnel, somehow squirting the bloody, barely containable stuff straight into the opening. He does this again and again with breathtaking speed, mowing his way across the wooden table, like a thresher cutting a row through a cornfield, a long, plump, rapidly growing, glistening, fully filled length of sausage engorging to his left as he moves. It’s a dark, purplish color through the translucent membrane. An assistant pinches off links, pins them with broken bits of wooden skewer. In moments, they are done.
Back in the cold backyard, you’re on your fifth slivovitz when the sausages arrive in a cloud of vapor, straight from the pot. Everybody’s damp and a little drunk; hard country people with rough hands and features for whom a mist of cold rain is apparently no obstacle to a meal. There is goulash, mopped with crusts of bread, and there are blood soup and many sausages. The whole of the pig is very well represented. But it’s the blood sausage that sings—or, more accurately, spurts. You cut into it with your knife and it explodes across the plate like a Hollywood bullet hitting a skull—and again you think of Zola, the greatest of food pornographers, that wonderful scene in the charcuterie, our tragically absurd hero starving in the midst of ridiculous bounty. His in-laws stirring blood and spices for boudin noir, filling their glass display case with enticingly described delights he is unwelcome to try. It smells here like that room must have: blood and onions, paprika and a touch of nutmeg, notes of sweetness, longing…and death.
The woman at the end of the table with a face like a concrete pylon sees you close your eyes for a second, appreciating, and she smiles.
Six o’clock in the morning is when the pains raisins come out, and already the customers are lining up in the dark outside this tiny Parisian boulangerie waiting for the first batch. The baguettes are ready—piping-hot from the brick oven, fabulously, deliberately ugly and uneven in shape, slashed crudely across the top. They’re too hot to eat but you grab one anyway, tearing it open gingerly, then dropping two fingers full of butter inside. It instantly melts into liquid—running into the grooves and inner spaces of white interior. You grab it like a sandwich and bite, teeth making a cracking sound as you crunch through the crust. You haven’t eaten since yesterday lunch, your palate is asleep and just not ready for so much sensation. The reaction is violent. It hurts. Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.
On 59th Street, at a fancy Italian joint and fortified with Negronis, you’re ready for a good meal—but you’re not ready for the little cicchetti that arrive unexpectedly at the table: little pillows of sea urchin roe sitting atop tiny slices of toasted bread. Wonderful enough, one would think, but the chef has done something that goes beyond mischievous, possibly into the realm of the unholy: melting onto each plump orange egg-sac is a gossamer-thin shaving of lardo, the lightly cured and herbed pork fat made in marble caverns in the mountains of Tuscany, slowly curling around its prey, soon to dissolve. You hurry to put it in your mouth, knowing it’s surely a sin against God—and are all the happier for it. It’s too much. Way too much. Beyond rich…beyond briny-sweet. Beyond decency. You call the waiter over and ask for more.
This prawn comes from particularly deep waters, you are told by the man tending the coals. Special waters. He makes the charcoal himself—two different mixes. The grills are of his own design as well—gleaming, spotlessly clean metal squares, each raised and lowered to specifically selected heights by the turn of a wheel. He puts almost nothing on what he cooks. Sea salt. A spritz of Spanish olive oil from a pump bottle. He’s smiling as he places the prawn in front of you and you eat the tail first, stripping away the shell and taking it in two bites. But then comes the head, twisted free and waiting for you. You raise it to your mouth and suck out the soup of hot brains, squeezing it like a toothpaste tube. Silence for a moment, then, from outside, you hear the sheep bleating faintly in the hills. The man smiles, pleased you’ve properly appreciated his prawn. He has something else. He removes another small pile of burning coals from one of the wood-burning ovens and places it beneath one of his jury-rigged grills, lowers the grid all the way, fans the embers. He produces another device of his own making—a sauté pan that looks more like a strainer than any known cooking vessel—sprays it lightly with oil. He heats it for a few seconds over the glowing coal, then quickly—quickly, but delicately—drops in a handful of tiny, translucent baby eels, sprinkles them with a few granules of salt while he makes them leap once, twice in the pan. In seconds, they are off the fire and into a bowl. They are, you fully appreciate (at this time of year, anyway), the rarest of the rare of God’s edible creatures. Each linguine-thin eel has swum here all the way from the Sargasso Sea, upriver into northern Spain—to be caught live. The man has killed them only minutes ago, poisoning them with tobacco. During the two or three weeks you can get them (in the unlikely event you can get them at all), they sell for upwards of a thousand dollars a kilo. They are barely cooked. They don’t need to be—they shouldn’t be cooked more. Twirled on a fork and lifted to the mouth, they whisper secrets. This, you tell yourself, is a flavor one shouldn’t speak of.
Sichuan hotpot is where you find out some very dark things about yourself. You look around at the others in the crowded, painfully bright dining room in Chengdu, wiping the backs of their necks with cold napkins, their faces red and contorted with pain. Some of them hold their stomachs. But they plow on, as you do, dipping chopsticks loaded with organ meats, fish balls, and vegetables into the giant woks of dark, sinister-looking oil. It’s like that Victorian brothel in London you’ve read about, the one that had a spanking machine—could paddle forty customers at a time. There’s that kind of consensual perversion going on here. As if we are, all of us—though strangers to one another—bound by an awful compulsion we share. The liquid boils and bubbles like witch’s brew opaque, reddish brown distillate of the mind-blowingly excessive amounts of dried Sichuan chilies bobbing and roiling up throughout. The oil is cooking down, reducing by the minute and growing yet more powerful. You drag a hunk of tripe through the oil; it disappears below the surface, where it shrinks, then hardens like an aroused nipple; and then you remove it from the hell-broth and into your mouth. The heat from the dried peppers nearly lifts your head off—but there is something else. Tiny black flower peppers, floating discreetly alongside their more aggressive cousins, have an eerie numbing effect, first on your tongue—and then your entire head. There’s the by now familiar floral dimension: you smell it everywhere in this part of China—it’s in the air…But now it comes on strong, comes to the rescue; like an ice cube applied to abused flesh, it counteracts the pain and burn of way more hot pepper than any man can or should reasonably bear. Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand.
Pain—followed by relief.
Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbness. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. You were, after many years on this planet and what you thought had been a full and rich life, pretty sure you didn’t go for such things. The film 9½ Weeks left you unmoved. At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed—even if the person offering was a German supermodel in ass-less latex chaps.
Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad.
Pleasure was good.
Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused.
Meat
I believe that the great American hamburger is a thing of beauty, its simple charms noble, pristine. The basic recipe—ground beef, salt, and pepper, formed into a patty, grilled or seared on a griddle, then nestled between two halves of a bun, usually but not necessarily accompanied by lettuce, a tomato slice, and some ketchup—is, to my mind, unimprovable by man or God. A good burger can be made more complicated, even more interesting by the addition of other ingredients—like good cheese, or bacon…relish perhaps, but it will never be made better.
I like a blue cheese burger as much as the next guy—when I’m in the mood for blue cheese. But if it’s a burger I want, I stick to the classics: meat—and bun.
I believe this to be the best way to eat a hamburger.
I believe that the human animal evolved as it did—with eyes in the front of its head, long legs, fingernails, eyeteeth—so that it could better chase down slower, stupider creatures, kill them, and eat them; that we are designed to find and eat meat—and only became better as a species when we learned to cook it.
We are not, however, designed to eat shit—or fecal coli-form bacteria, as it’s slightly more obliquely referred to after an outbreak. Tens of thousands of people are made sick every year by the stuff. Some have died horribly.
Shit happens, right? Literally, it turns out. That’s pretty much what I thought anyway—until I read recent news accounts of a particularly destructive outbreak of the pathogen O157:H7. What I came away with was a sense of disbelief, outrage, and horror—not so much at the fact that a deadly strain of E. coli found its way into our food supply and made people sick but at the way other, presumably healthy burgers are made—the ones that didn’t make anybody sick. I was well aware—I mean, I assumed—that your frozen pre-made burger patty—the one intended for institutional or low-end, fast-food use; your slender and cheap, pre-packaged supermarket disk—was not of the best-quality cuts. But when I read in the New York Times that, as standard practice, when making their “American Chef ’s Selection Angus Beef Patties,�
�� the food giant Cargill’s recipe for hamburger consisted of, among other things, “a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps” and that “the ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria” (italics my own), well…I was surprised.
By the end of the article, I came away with more faith in the people who process cocaine on jungle tarpaulins—or the anonymous but hardworking folks in their underwear and goggles who cut inner-city smack—than I had in the meat industry. I was no less carnivorous, but my faith had been seriously damaged. A central tenet of my belief system, that meat—even lesser-quality meat—was essentially a “good” thing, was shaken.
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Page 10