by Julie Powell
But short ribs contain a different kind of intimacy. A clandestine close-to-the-bone-ness. And so much fun because they’re sort of a secret. I mean, of course if you eat in the best of restaurants, you will see that short ribs have popped up all over the place in recent years, so it’s not as if these fatty, unctuous, glorious squares of bone and fat are my secret alone. Chefs and cooks and butchers, the tribe of people invested in the selling of meat and the feeding of people for money or love, all adore short ribs. We love them because they’re cheap, and because cooking them, while an investment in time, is the simplest thing you can do for the greatest reward. Bought for little more than a song, then simply left alone in an oven to braise for hours in wine or stock or beer, they come out glorious, the sort of food that leaves one feeling nourished not only in the gut but in the mind. You will feel as afloat as you do on a glass of good wine—not Margaux ’66 divine, just good wine, the wine you need on that particular happy, cold night. And whether you’re a chef trying to get your patrons to enjoy themselves and pay as much as possible for the privilege, at the least cost to you, or a woman who wants her friends and family to eat well, feel good, and be impressed for not much effort, short ribs are the way to go.
A NICE, SIMPLE WAY TO MAKE SHORT RIBS
4 pounds short ribs
Salt and pepper to taste
2 teaspoons crumbled dried rosemary
3 tablespoons bacon fat
3 cloves garlic, lightly crushed
1 small onion, cut into half rings
1 cup dry red wine
1 cup beef stock
Preheat the oven to 325°F.
Pat dry the ribs and trim off excess fat. I’m not a big fan of trimming fat off meat, as a general rule, but I think in this case it’s permissible and possibly even advisable. Once you’ve done this to your satisfaction, season generously with salt, pepper, and rosemary.
Warm the bacon fat over medium-high heat in an ovenproof stockpot until almost smoking. Quickly brown the ribs on all sides, working in batches, setting them aside on a plate once done. After all the ribs are browned, pour off all but three tablespoons of the fat in the pan and throw in the garlic and onion, stirring a couple of minutes until the garlic is fragrant and the onion is beginning to turn golden. Add the wine and stock, which will hiss and almost instantly come to a boil. Return the ribs, along with any juices that have collected on the plate, to the pot.
Cover and place in the hot oven. Cook until the meat falls very easily from the bone, at least two hours. Serve four to six of your friends, with the pan juices and a big scoop of mashed potatoes.
And oxtails? Oxtails are even more of a secret than that. It’s the name that camouflages them so well. Oxtail. That is just five kinds of unpleasant. And it also happens to be exactly accurate. Oxtails come out of the box that each steer is delivered with, containing all the extra bits Josh might want to use. There’s the liver, and the heart, which is also delicious, and not scary at all, once you’ve gotten yourself around all the metaphors and imagery. A heart is just a muscle, after all, which is something I should remember more often. The tongue. The sweetbreads, occasionally, if we’re lucky. (Sweetbreads—another instance of necessary euphemism—are actually thymus glands and are a pain in the ass to remove, generally not worth it unless you’re working with a large number of slaughtered animals at a time.) And the tail. Which looks just like a tail. A little more than a foot long, two or three inches in diameter at the base, tapering to a point, threaded through with the last bones of the vertebrae, getting smaller all the time.
To prepare the oxtails for the case, ready to cook and eat, you cut between each vertebra, which is a fun thing to do because it’s so much easier than you’d think. At this point, each is joined to the next by cartilage that is simple to cut through with a boning knife once you find the right spot. And although the bones are getting narrower and narrower in diameter, they’re all the same length, so once you’ve found the first point of breach, it’s child’s play to guess where the next will come. It makes me feel powerful and smart and, yes, a little sexy to cut up oxtails. When I’m done, I am left with about ten cylinders of meat and bone, all the same height, the thickest of them lush rosettes of meat with bright white centers, the smallest ones no larger than a fingertip, almost entirely white, hardly any meat to them at all. Arranged on a plate for the case, they seem to naturally fit together into a whorling, floral circle, the most beautiful thing on display. And yet no one buys them. They are my secret. I take them home and cook them for myself. And for Eric, of course.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about D, about the desolation I feel without him. I wake up with him in my head, go to sleep with him still there, drink and drink to try to make him go away. Even the butchery, that blessed distraction, that way I can take a knife and do something new, break something apart to make something else beautiful, understand something, a body, its parts, the logic of it—even that chases the memory of my old lover, the longing for him, to the far edges of my mind, but not away. He’s always there when I quit for the day, wash up, drive back to the city or to my small rental apartment. Retreating into the dark with my iPod for company (all the songs reminding me of him) is like watching a fire dying in the wilderness at night, the creeping thing getting closer, hovering at the edge of the light.
I’ve thought a lot about that. And yet, sometimes I think I’ve thought almost not at all about my marriage of ten years, about the man I’ve known and loved since I was eighteen years old, a child, unformed. About the man who formed me, not like a sculptor, not like a person of intention and power, but like a sapling taking root too closely to its sister, so that they grew and slowly grew until, so many years later, you’d think they were one tree, their branches so entwined, their bark overlapping, their trunks joined. Now that they are essentially one thing, to kill one would be to kill them both. I haven’t let myself think much about that. Eric would say—does say—that the reason for this is that I have no room in my besotted, childish mind for him anymore. That D has overtaken me, seduced me, made me small, and that my love for him, my yearning, is all I feel anymore. There’s some truth to this version. But there’s also a gigantic hole in it.
D does consume me, still. When one has eaten a beautiful dry-aged steak, one remembers it, longs for it. That longing doesn’t stop. At least, it hasn’t yet, and doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.
But that’s not the reason I’ve not been writing about Eric. The thing is this. Longing, love, lust, all those L words—that’s easy to write about. I can think about the way D fucked me, or the way his hair felt silky under my fingers, or that mole on the inside of his index finger, or that tiny lump in his earlobe—and I’m there. I’m living it again. I’m remembering something I had and don’t have anymore, something I don’t have to imagine doing without because I’m doing without it. I may cry afterward, from the loss, but there’s pleasure in it as well.
But to think about Eric, now, after these years of pain, is to contemplate something incomprehensible to me. Separation.
Of course I’ve thought about it. We both have. We’ve even done it. But because I’ve spoken the words, because I’ve lived without him for a period of time, doesn’t mean I understand it. Eric’s right, I don’t think about our marriage that much, not in the way I think about being in bed with D. But it’s for the same reason I don’t ponder my veins, or the floor of my room. I don’t ponder because I don’t even see the world without it. It’s too big, or buried too deep, with edges that thin out to nothingness, binding itself to everything else. It’s embedded in my dark, precious flesh.
Gwen speaks, sympathetically, of a “clean break.” She sees the pain we have been putting ourselves through, and she doesn’t get it. Why we inflict such torture. Why we still stand like boxers who can’t throw the punches anymore but have the unconquerable advantage of not being able to fall down. “A clean break.” (Divorce, a word I won’t permit, can’t even take seriously.)
As if we were just cracking open a joint. As if we could just apply enough pressure, push hard enough, and come loose from each other with a satisfying pop and a slow, clean drip. She, our closest friend, doesn’t quite realize that we’re one thing, Eric and I. Not the “one flesh” bullshit of the wedding ceremony. But one bone. You can’t snap a bone in two with a delicious pop. You have to hack, saw, destroy.
When I cut up the rib bones to take home for a slow-cooked Sunday supper, the band saw makes a buzzing roar and the pleasant smell of scorched bone drifts to my nostrils. They will make a warming stew for a chilly night. I bag them up, along with my oxtails, say my good-byes, and head home, two hours back to the city. On the way there, my thoughts are predictably filled with D. Part of me imagines driving to his apartment, knocking, making him let me in. But I don’t. I drive home, where my universe awaits, to make oxtail soup.
All this, the short ribs and sex and Fleisher’s and D, these are things that, heartbreaking though it might be to contemplate, I can imagine doing without. I can’t imagine that about Eric. Which means, in a strange way, that I can’t really see him.
But I’m getting there, coming closer. Or maybe I can feel his absence getting closer. Another thing edging in with the shrinking reach of the campfire’s circle of light. That possibility. And that scares me. It seems horrible that in order to see my dear husband I have to be able to picture my world without him. But maybe I shouldn’t be so afraid. Dreaming it doesn’t have to make it so. I can think of a life without short ribs, but that doesn’t mean I have to live it.
Maybe, just maybe, seeing us for what we are, both together and apart, will make our dark worlds a little less scary.
10
The Dying Art
EVERYTHING HAS SUNK into gray, still, icy winter. Nothing seems to move—not me, not Eric, not this paralyzing need and sorrow. Even the butcher shop has become routine, a pleasant enough routine, just as my marriage has become a pleasant routine, usually, marred only by the occasional late-night crying session or insinuating comment.
Out of the blue, one day, while I’m stocking the freezer in the front of the shop—quart-sized containers of duck stock, packages of dog food patties, locally made yogurt—I get that back-pocket buzz.
So are you fucking somebody? Just wondering.
I go red, self-consciously turn my face to the open freezer door while I rack my brain to think of what I’ve done now. Other than Jessica and, I suspect, Josh, none of the gang up here knows much of anything about any of this, and I don’t want them to now. I type with my back turned to the meat counter.
What?!! No! Why?
I just figured.… Whatever. Do what you have to do.
I’m not DOING anything!
And I’m not. There was a time not so long ago when I was, when I tried to dull the ache with a handful of anonymous encounters, rough and unpleasant. But it didn’t work; I only wound up being both hurt and bored. Bored automatically by any other men who wanted me, their panting, the resentful sense of obligation their want made me feel, their lack of imagination and intelligence—evident in both their copious spelling errors and the eagerness with which they wanted to fuck me. Because they gave me their attention for such a pittance, they weren’t worthy to give it.
All of this is just the tiny tip of the lethal iceberg of all I can’t bear to talk to Eric about, even though he knows it, or some of it, anyway. The fear I feel at the prospect of simply speaking is akin to the terror of being physically beaten, though my gentle-hearted husband would never in a million years do such a thing. I bear the sorrow of not being able to talk to my best friend because it hurts less than imagining the stark fear of talking to him.
Sometimes, though, it surfaces, briefly, in the middle of sleepless nights of tossing. Four a.m. always the dark hour.
“I hate that you love that asshole!”
I told Jessica that we never fight, and that is mostly the truth. I hesitate to even call these late-night outbursts “fights,” because that suggests a mutuality, or common field of battle. What it is instead is the shedding of the patchwork of defenses Eric has built up to be able to live with me in peace every day. His eyes fly open; he is suddenly awake. He sighs loudly, tosses, mutters. I am instantly as wide-awake as he, but I keep my eyes studiously closed, try mightily to keep my breath even and slow, as if he’ll not unleash his anger on me if I play possum convincingly enough. The more he tosses, the more still I become. And sometimes it works. Sometimes, on lucky early mornings, he drifts back to sleep by around six thirty or seven without having said anything more than a grunted “Oh, Julie” that I can pretend to have slept through. Other nights, he grabs me suddenly, by the shoulders, shakes me. And he makes the one declaration he has spent the last hours working over in his mind, the one terrible, heartbroken, angry, justified lament:
“Why don’t you just tell me to leave?”
“I don’t want… I don’t know… I…” I try to speak, but there are only two words I can say that are both true and not so hurtful as to be lethal to both of us. So I sob out all my guilt and love and hurt and sorrow, shuddering. “I’m sorry, so sorry, I’m so sorry…”
And we cry ourselves back to sleep. Awaking at eight thirty, groggy and swollen-eyed, to the yowls of indignant cats—the whine of a Siamese mix with a thyroid problem is not to be denied—and to the more affable but increasingly sneezy beseeches of a dog in deep need of a morning constitutional, we gingerly approach discussion as we move through our morning routines achily, as if we’ve both spent the night being beaten with bags full of oranges.
As he stands naked in the bathroom, waiting for the water in the shower to heat up: “We’ve just been doing this for so long.”
As I pull open a tin of Wellness cat food: “You think I don’t wish I could stop?”
As he pauses at the door with his satchel over his shoulder, his hand on the knob: “Will you be home tonight?” (Dreading that the answer will be “no,” but also relishing, in some dark place, the sharp, clean stab that “no” would bring.)
“I have nowhere else to be.”
“Me neither.”
“Maybe couples therapy.” I repress a cringe at the suggestion. I don’t know why it is that the prospect of counseling feels like a life imprisonment sentence.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
The day is filled with e-mails and text messages that are tender and long and, because they are not imbued with the horrors of face-to-face discussion, more direct. We have our most probing talks in cyberspace. And yet mostly they are talks about needing to talk, and then sometime at around four o’clock I tell him I can’t handle talking, not tonight, and so I’m going to buy wine instead. And he is kind, he says, “Take care of yourself.” The rug lifts easily up to accept the settled dust, and we are okay for a while.
Though Eric, the one of us who yells and accuses, is not the only one with suspicions. I suspect that Eric is not being entirely honest when he says he has nowhere to go. I know that there is the other woman out there, still thinking of him. She’s written him passionate, longing e-mails (I snoop too, I am no innocent, just moderately less technologically adept is all); she not only let him into her bed, but continues to speak to him, even after all this time, perhaps with frustration but also with affection and patience and sweetness. I am not angry with him for having her; I am not angry at the woman either, who after all can be accused of nothing more than having better taste in men than I do. I’m not angry, though I’m sure Eric would rather I was. I am simply envious.
In many ways, I think bitterly, he is far less alone than I am. Occasionally at least he can still “accidentally” make out in a cab after a party. At least he is occasionally told he is wanted. I have no one to make out with in a cab. I long just to be kissed.
But it’s also not true that I have no place to go. I may not have the solace of sex. But I have Fleisher’s. And I try to escape there as often as I can. My bribe to justify the ever
-increasing length of my stays is the meat. Eric has grown exceedingly fond of the meat. But the fact is that Eric and I both use my trips upstate as one more way, besides the rivers of wine we dose ourselves with, to hide from each other.
I go, I cut, I drink both together with my friends and, more often, alone. I read and watch movies on my laptop at night. I don’t troll for sex, I don’t try to get off, I hardly even cry, anymore, and when I do it’s quiet and slow. I eat lots of meat. Every now and again, Josh even forces one of his aged steaks on me.
Incredible things, these steaks, once you’ve trimmed off the blackened detritus that is an inevitable result of dry aging—it is in fact the key to what dry aging is. It’s also why dry-aged meat is expensive.
A dry-aged strip steak isn’t cherished for the same reason that, say, tenderloin is cherished. A tenderloin is pricey right off the animal. Once you’ve learned the trick of taking it off, a tenderloin is just about the easiest money you can make as a butcher. Perhaps a minute to remove it, you don’t even have to clean it up, trim the fat or silver skin. Just throw it in a Cryovac bag and send it off to some big-city restaurant where some chef will cook it up with a minimum of fuss and a sauce he could make in his sleep, and charge top dollar for this tender, insipid meat his customers so clamor for, a muscle that the animal literally never uses, so that it never sees the exertion and struggle that makes for both toughness and flavor.
But a dry-aged steak is expensive for what’s done to it. And, more specifically, what’s taken away from it. Between the moment a rib section comes into the shop and when, after three weeks of aging, it is cut on the band saw and trimmed into steaks, it loses fifty percent of its weight. Some of this goes to loss of moisture. The muscles have literally dried out. More is lost to plain old unglamorous rot. The outside edges of the rib section get dark, even black, and slimy. If conditions are right, and Josh is meticulous about the conditions in his cooler, the decay—and that is what it is—continues at an even, controlled pace. There is no mold, no creepy crawlies. But there is the slow breaking down of flesh, some of the inevitabilities of what happens to dead things in the very best of circumstances. While the flavor of the muscle’s interior is intensifying into the quintessence of beef, and growing impossibly, meltingly tender, the protective outside edges are merely drying, aging, “going over.” It’s inedible, it’s got to go.