Every Beef Eater Should Read This
By Lindsay Sterling
Most animal parts come so
deconstructed from the whole that I don’t think of animals at all when I’m
cooking. Steak tips are steak tips. Hamburgers are hamburgers. This is perhaps
how I’ve lived as a meat eater, in a kind of denial: I’m not eating animals, I’m eating meat. But recently I came face
to face with an animal part that threatened my usual delusion. At a recent
family reunion, my brother-in-law, Tom, gave me a gift from Vermont: the tongue
of his young grass-fed, organic heifer. He gave it to me frozen, sealed in
thick plastic. What a gift! It was special, priceless, and gross. I had never cooked
tongue myself, but I recalled my two Russian friends, Alla and Yulia, reminiscing
about the good old days of beef tongue in Russia, so I took it to them, hoping
they’d know what to do with it.
In their kitchen, Alla took the thawed
hunk of muscle out of the package. It was long and huge like a giant slug. Alla
and Yulia looked excited. Reunited with
beef tongue at last! I’d never seen a beef tongue before, so I was trying
to act like I was totally cool with the fact that there was cow’s tongue on the
cutting board in front of me. It looked a lot like my own tongue, only bigger,
and it was blue-gray like dead people on CSI.
As far as animal body parts go, tongue ranks up there in my book with bull’s
balls as the grossest animal part I could think to eat. Sure, when you think
about eating chopped up animal parts, it’s all gross: shoulder, leg, back,
ribs, tongue, heart – what’s the difference? But the tongue just seems so personal.
Like you might as well just boil the cow’s eyeballs so that they can look up at
you, cooked, from a bowl of eyeball soup.
Alla simmered the massive tongue in
water with bay leaf, onion, parsley, carrot, and salt for an hour and a half
while she and her daughter made some dishes to go with it: mashed potatoes, sautéed
mushrooms, and a garden salad. When Alla said the tongue was done, it still
looked like a cow’s tongue even though now it was floating in a broth that
looked like soup, flecked with pretty triangles of carrot. She removed it from
the broth, peeled off the layer of outer skin, and then sliced the tongue crosswise
into medallions of meat, about two inches wide. Finally, we were looking at meat. It looked good, like normal beef. And it
tasted delicious. The texture was smooth, unlike the striated quality of other
cuts of meat, and a little bouncy on the tooth. It was great with a little
horseradish on top along with the whole meal they’d prepared.
When I was telling my mother about
my squeamishness, she scolded, “Farm to table people need to grow up and get
some tongue. Where do people think all the beef tongues go?” Tom told me that the
other farmers he knows throw the tongues away because there’s no market anymore
for them. Apparently, sometime in the last 50 years Americans became too cool
for peasant food. They’d rather just throw undeniable body parts away than face
the truth: most of us eat chopped up animals and like it. The whole experience
got me thinking that we’ve got to bring tongue back in to vogue. Yeah, it’s
hard to look at, but you could always just cook it with your eyes closed.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2014
