Year of the Cow

by Jared Stone

  “I am. That okay?”

  “Of course!” she says brightly. “Looking forward to it.”

  I smile back. Were I a colder, crueler person, I’d remain silent. But of course I can’t. “I was going to make you a heart.”

  “What … like on a card?”

  “Not exactly.” My eyes flick to the freezer out the door behind her.

  Slowly, recognition creeps across her face. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, my.”

  “It’s Valentine’s Day!” I offer. “I thought it’d be thematically appropriate.”

  “Oh, it is,” she counters. “I’m just not sure it’s romantically appropriate.”

  “I have it on every authority that it will be delicious.”

  “And every authority is…?”

  “Eben.”

  “Right.” She considers a moment. Finally, grimly, she nods. “Alright, I’m game.” She turns to leave the room. “You’ll understand if I don’t help cook, though.”

  “Sure.” I watch her go, then turn to the fridge and withdraw a large rectangular package, wrapped tightly in butcher paper. I unwrap the heart and lay it on the counter. Examining the centerpiece of the circulatory system, I understand my wife’s trepidation. Last time I wrangled a beef heart was in a sixth-grade dissection. Standing in Mrs. Parish’s sixth-grade biology unit, a scalpel in one hand and a blood clot freshly excised from a bovine aorta in the other—the air thick with the acrid scent of formaldehyde. Dinner was the last thing any of us were thinking about.

  Today, I’m not cooking a whole heart—my butcher has divided it up into sections. To my amateur eye, I’ll be cooking the right atrium and ventricle. The piece in front of me is rectangular, a dark ruby in color, overlaid on the outside with irregular layers of hard white fat. On the other side, the interior of the chambers, a spiderweb of very firm, very fibrous tissue of some sort covers the surface. I have no idea what it is, but Zac would later tell me that they’re the trabeculae carneae, Latin for “meaty ridges.” Appropriate.

  Heart is a different sort of muscle from what I’m accustomed to. It’s cardiac muscle rather than skeletal muscle. As a result, it has a very different texture from the kind of muscle that helps the animal move around. It’s much denser and has a much finer grain structure. Per Eben’s counsel, I’ll have to clean it really well to get off all the fibrous tissue on the interior and exterior of the piece. I’m also told that it has a really pronounced flavor, and I’ll be amplifying that flavor with an overnight marinade.

  I’m making what in Peru is known as anticuchos de corazón, or marinated beef heart on a stick, grilled hot and fast. It’s a common street food there, frequently noshed off carts by in-the-know locals or oblivious tourists. I’ll admit, I’m a little wary of cooking this particular cut of beef, but I think it’s something that I ought to do. I’m taking the responsibility of making the most of this animal that died to feed my family, and this is part of that transaction. And, if it’s delicious, all the better.

  First things first, though: I have to clean it. I pull a boning knife from my knife block. I need to trim off everything that isn’t red and uniform. It takes the better part of a half hour for me to slice off all the fat, valves, and ropy layer of tissue inside the chambers.

  Sometimes, when people buy beef at a supermarket, there’s a red liquid inside the package, which they quite reasonably assume is blood. It isn’t—the blood is all drained during the butchering process. That red liquid is a material called myoglobin—an oxygen-transport protein that’s present in meat and is responsible for making red meat red.

  Hearts have a lot of myoglobin.

  My once white cutting board is stained red, as are my hands and part of the counter. There’s also some on my shirt (I should have worn an apron), which I’m not especially happy about. A nearby glass bowl holds all the detritus and viscera we won’t be eating. Glass was probably a suboptimal choice from a not-freaking-out-the-wife perspective. Because the bowl is clear, the glistening red jiggly bits are visible from any angle. A slasher film could shoot B-roll in my kitchen right now.

  Once it’s cleaned, I’m left with a few slim steaks that are very lean and very, very red. I knock together a marinade using the aji amarillo and aji panca pastes that I picked up at the Latin market. These pastes are unfamiliar to me—tiny jars of what could be mustard and ketchup but are made from yellow and red Peruvian chili peppers, respectively. The yellow, amarillo, is blatantly spicy, whereas the red, panca, is earthier, with a slower burn of capsaicin heat—the stuff that makes hot peppers hot. I add some cumin, pepper, garlic, olive oil, and salt to make a marinade. Finally, I slice the meat into strips, slip them into the marinade, and stash everything in the fridge overnight so the culinary chemistry can work its magic.

  Meanwhile, I clean up, offering some of the heart trimmings to my dog. Basil wolfs them down. She’s always had a fondness for organ meat, and liver and heart were regular parts of her diet when we fed her raw. Heart is really rich in B vitamins and iron, so I’m happy to be able to supplement her diet.

  The next night, I skewer the heart slices on spears of sharpened bamboo, chuckling inwardly at parallels with Cupid’s arrow that I don’t dare say aloud. I grill the skewers over high heat on a griddle in the kitchen. They don’t take long to cook. I pair them with roasted parsnips. I’m getting pretty good with parsnips.

  Late in the evening, my wife and I sit down to dinner and glasses of peppery Shiraz. With some trepidation, we slice into our very literal Valentine’s Day meal.

  Flavor? Good, but intense. Spicy and incredibly rich. I don’t have much else to compare it with. I’ve eaten other organs before, but none like this. None I’ve met in a scientific context as well as a culinary one. The slices of heart are dense and lean, with an undertone of organ meat. The mouthfeel is quite unlike that of skeletal muscles, which feel almost fluffy by comparison. This is cardiac muscle. This is a very different tissue.

  “So?” I ask my wife. “What do you think?”

  She puts down her fork. “Thank you for making it.”

  “That good, huh?”

  She smiles, but only politely. “Thank you for making it,” she says again.

  “You don’t like it.”

  She considers a moment before replying. “I do not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just so … rubbery. And it’s a heart.”

  “It is Valentine’s Day…”

  “There is such a thing as metaphor, Jared.”

  I put my own fork down. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t wreck Valentine’s Day.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t.” She pats my hand. “I am going to go see what else is in the fridge, though.”

  No doubt, this meal is intense. And if I’m honest—half that intensity is psychological. It doesn’t taste unpleasant per se. It’s just that there’s a lot more on my plate here besides dinner. Because of the texture and flavor of this meat, there’s no question whatsoever that we are eating an animal’s heart. Joining us at the table is the unavoidable reality of the sacrifice that puts this meal on the table.

  Off-putting? Maybe. That depends on your point of view. Appropriate for a lighthearted and romantic Valentine’s Day meal? Perhaps not.

  In my opinion, if we take an animal’s life for a meal, we owe it to that animal to make the most of the sacrifice. In this case, we’re eating a heart. It’s one more meal from the carcass, one more dinner where we don’t have to look elsewhere—to another cut or another critter—for sustenance. One more moment of recognition that this was once an animal, and we must not—should not, cannot—take it for granted.

  It wasn’t a great meal. But it was a good meal. And I’m glad we did it.

  * * *

  It has taste buds.

  That was my first thought handling the tongue as I patted it dry on my cutting board. Its surface has a very pronounced texture, kind of like a cat’s tongue. Bumpy one way, smooth the other. As though natur
e has designed it to pull food back into the mouth—which in fact it has. When feeding, the steer grabs the blades of grass with his tongue and pulls them back into his mouth to chew. Beef tongues are prehensile.

  The tongue is multicolored, white with dark spots, with a blue stamp on the side that means it’s been federally inspected for wholesomeness. Tonight, this tongue will be dinner. And since I’m an adopted Angelino, I’m making lengua tacos. The tacos that taste you back.

  My friend Ben first introduced me to the world of home-style, authentic taqueria tacos here in Los Angeles. I hadn’t even moved here yet—I still lived in D.C. but was in town for a shoot for my employer at the time, and Ben was the first guy I called when I crewed up the gig. We grabbed lunch at a tiny hole-in-the-wall taqueria on the wrong end of Hollywood Boulevard. Ben, knowing me all too well, suggested that I might enjoy the tacos de lengua, or “beef tongue tacos.” He was right.

  Tonight, Ben and his fiancée, Roo, will be joining us, a few scant hours from now. Roo is Ben’s perfect counterpoint—a tattooed circus performer and film grip with enough moxie to give Ben a run for his money. Los Angeles, because it’s a few dozen small towns shoved together and forced to mingle, has a way of atomizing its populace. It’s all too easy to maroon yourself on a sociocultural island and lose contact with anyone who isn’t a part of your daily routine. I haven’t seen Ben and Roo in a while—too long, in my opinion. One of the best aspects of this beef experiment is that it counteracts this atomization—it brings people together over the promise and excuse of a meal and the opportunity to catch up. Something about the ceremony of a special occasion meal demands it be shared with friends.

  In the meantime, my house is a maelstrom of activity, as I prep for dinner and Summer turns the piles of laundry and toys scattered around our house into hidden piles of laundry and toys stashed in closets and under beds.

  The tongue is a big piece of meat, 2.52 pounds and lean. Almost pure muscle, without a lot of fat running through it that I can see—not that I can see very well. It still has an outer layer of taste buds attached. This project has also been a phenomenal anatomy lesson for me. From what I understand, the braising process (because that’s essentially what I’m doing) will dissolve the connective tissue holding the outer layer of taste buds onto the muscle itself. Then I can remove the taste buds with a pair of pliers, like a foot from a sock. A meat sock.

  For now, however, the tongue is sitting on my counter. Quietly coming up to room temperature. Endlessly pronouncing the letter “L.”

  Before I cook, I have to prepare. First things first: salsa. Since this should be cool from the fridge when I serve it, it isn’t especially time-sensitive. I dehusk and roast some tomatillos under the broiler until gently charred, then drop them in a blender with fresh lime juice, some diced onion, jalapeños, cilantro, and a little sugar. Thirty seconds of frenzied pulses later, I have salsa verde. Into the fridge it goes.

  Now to the primary task at hand. This tongue will need to braise for around three hours. The pot I’m using—a twelve-quart behemoth I used to brew beer in—is too big to stash in the oven, so I’ll have to do it stovetop and ride shotgun on the temperature to control the simmer.

  Generally, I prefer to braise in an oven. There, the heat radiates in from all sides, so that the pot is heated evenly at a determined temperature. In this case, the heat will be coming only up from the bottom and rising up through the column of my cooking vessel. Also, the stovetop doesn’t have a thermometer. I’ll have to keep an eye on the dial to maintain a gentle simmer; I don’t want roiling bubbles, but I don’t want a placid surface on the braising liquid, either. I’m looking for gentle bubbles breaking the surface every second or so.

  I put eight quarts of water in the pot over the biggest burner I have. I add in two big white onions, quartered; an entire peeled head of garlic—ten cloves or so; nine bay leaves; a fat tablespoon of peppercorns; and two big tablespoons of salt. When the liquid boils, I delicately slip in the tongue and move the whole pot to a smaller burner over low heat.

  Somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark, my entire house smells like ground zero of a vampire holocaust. Scents of onions and garlic and many good things fill the air.

  “That smells amazing!” my wife comments, dashing through the room with a throw pillow in one hand and a fistful of kid-generated detritus in the other. “What is it?”

  “Onions, garlic, and water.”

  “Well … yay, onions, garlic, and water,” she says awkwardly.

  “Sit tight. I’ll give you something to cheer about.” If you’re cooking, you can be a little cocky. Seriously, friends: Do not drop a line like that unless you are standing in a kitchen, in front of a hot stove, holding tongs, and wearing an apron and perhaps a bandanna, as I was. Unless you are cooking, you will come across as a colossal asshole. I don’t know why it is, but there is something in the alchemy of good smells and heat that erases all the sins of ego.

  Still looking like a bedraggled culinary pirate, I survey my environs. When cooking, and especially when cooking something unfamiliar, I like to be prepared. I’ll be serving these with a little radish garnish, so I slice some up. I do likewise with some cilantro and put a fine dice on some gorgeous red onions.

  Then, that’s it. Nothing more to do. Summer’s tidied up the place and sat down to practice the piano. In front of me, I have a wait on a braise and a moment to reflect. I feel the familiar urge to “do something,” be productive, make a dent in my day. However, I can’t argue with chemistry, and chemistry (hopefully) is what’s making this tongue into something lovely over the course of the next few hours. But this tension between productivity and taking a moment to relax is familiar to me by now, so I pick up another book—Matter by Iain M. Banks, in this case—and pour a cup of tea. I settle in on the couch for an hour’s respite.

  Which I really need. Sometimes it’s indescribably nice to just sit still for a moment. To decouple from the Machine and productivity and people asking for things. To sit quietly, breathe deeply, and maybe even dare to be just a little bored. Sometimes I feel like the monk who hit himself in the head day and night, because it felt so good to stop. Only frequently, I forget to stop.

  Seventy minutes later, refreshed and ready, I run through a quick, last-minute check before my guests arrive. I have all my accoutrements laid out in what—if I do say so myself—is a tight and efficient mise en place. I mentally walk through the steps I’ll be taking when the tongue comes out. Rest, skin, slice—

  Wait. Skin. I need something to skin it with. I fish around in my closet and pull up a pair of pliers. A filthy pair of pliers. Yikes. I’d rather not ruin this beautiful, interesting piece of meat—of which I have only one—by poking it with dirty tools as soon as it pops out of the culinary hot tub.

  I can fix this.

  I wash the pliers thoroughly, then pour two inches of water into a very small pot over a very large flame. I chuck the pliers in so that the water only covers their steel head. Ten minutes at a rolling boil, and any industrial waste or bacterial creature that could possibly have called those pliers home have definitely crossed the veil and joined the choir invisible.

  Ben and Roo arrive and I pour a glass of wine for everyone, while Summer shuffles Declan off to bed before turning to the task at hand. Tortillas.

  Summer had the brilliant idea to make homemade tortillas for this little culinary adventure. She picked up some Maseca, a special corn flour that’s excellent for making tortillas, from the Latin market near our house. I don’t generally eat corn, but I sometimes make exceptions. And if someone makes hand-formed tortillas from scratch in their own kitchen, you can bet I’ll descend upon them like a ravenous dog. There’s only one acceptable response to someone going to that kind of effort—and that response is “thank you.” Real food and earnest effort trump dietary orthodoxy.

  Summer begins to build the tortilla dough, and Roo jumps in to lend a hand. Moments later, we are all aboard the express train to Tortilla
town, and the dinner preparation is under way.

  When the tongue is finished, I fish it out of the braising liquid with two pairs of industrial-sized tongs. Then I snatch up my Pliers of Sanitation and pull off the outer layer of the tongue in two or three enormous, membraney strips, leaving behind a very tender, very aromatic piece of meat.

  I thumb the oven to warm and drop my trusty cast-iron skillet onto a burner. I slice the tongue into thin strips and sauté them in a little olive oil. Braises benefit from a sear, but because the tongue was covered in a layer of taste buds, it never got one. I’m rectifying that now.

  When all the slices have seared, I dice them up into little tongue bits and stash them in the warm oven. My job here is done.

  Ben and I take a seat at the dining room table, outside the kitchen, while Summer and Roo finish tortillas on a hot griddle. The two of them work together like a well-oiled machine, and I’m excited to taste the fruits of their labor.

  Suddenly, shrill electronic beeping screams from the kitchen. I dash to the door and peer in.

  No big deal. There’s a little smoke in the air, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  “You okay?”

  “Yep,” Summer answers. “No biggie.” She reaches up and pokes the alarm’s cancel button with a thumb.

  Our smoke alarm goes off all the time. I don’t see flames, so I’m not worried. Summer and Roo are probably cooking with olive oil or something and got a little aggressive with the heat. Olive oil smokes if you look at it funny. I nod, relieved, and return to my chair. This wine is delightful.

  “So,” I say to Ben, swirling wine in my glass. “How’s wedding planning coming?”

  “Good, man. So much to do.”

  “I can only imagine,” I reply. “Summer and I only had forty people at ours. Roo said you guys are doing a three-hundred-person cavalcade of circus performers and superheroes. You guys must be going nuts.”

  “Yeah. It’s a lot.” He sips his wine. “So when you were doing yours, how did you ask your guys to be in your wedding?”