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The Last Supper?

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For better or worse, I never got the chance to test Rabbi Alper's faith. He called at four o'clock on the afternoon of the banquet to cancel.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. A few hours earlier Father Heier had his assistant ring me up to say something had come up at the good father's parish and he wouldn't be able to attend the evening's feast.

Damn them, you might say. But really, can you blame them? No doubt these are forgiving men, but it takes a man of a certain thread count to accept a total stranger's invitation to a repast of home-cooked organ meat.

Not one to let a good batch of duck tongue go to waste, by 2 p.m. I was on the phone to Washington Avenue gallery owner Ellen Curlee and her photographer husband, Durb, who didn't let me down.

In fact, as the light turned golden and tilted in from the west, the Curlees were among the first guests to arrive. Mindful that Keep It Down: The Dinner Party! had been abandoned by the church, Durb had outfitted himself with a priest's collar, an article of clothing I can only imagine he has lying around for just such occasions.

For our dining environs, we'd chosen a stone-sided home tucked away on a wooded lot near Faust Park in Chesterfield. The table was set on an elevated patio that veritably floated upon a dense forest, now and then offering views of the emerald valley off in the distance. The air was cool and slightly moist on the skin, and we'd lined the iron railing with a string of soft-lit globes. A swimming pool, long since converted to a pond, gurgled in the background, and a colony of frogs stepped out to feast in the evening air.

I must say, the thought of serving those frogs to my assembled guests occurred to me more than once.

Lucky for them, I'd already prepared my Tesselated Tripe and Liver Terrine.

As it turned out, despite the hours I'd labored over it — despite the boiling, the milk bath, the pastis, roasted red peppers and the wilted spinach — my Tessellated Tripe and Liver Terrine could not overcome its basic tripeyness.

Not that it tasted bad. It didn't. Not only did you have a lovely layering of reds, greens and grays — on the whole, it was quite delicious. But that honeycomb still had some fight left in it. The meat was rubbery, and each time a tooth hit a chamber, it sprung back. Sort of like eating a trampoline.

Not only that, but every so often I'd hit upon a morsel of tripe that was unseasoned, yielding forth the unadulterated flavor of aged, boiled dairy cow stomach.

I've tasted worse, but I can't remember when.

"Have you ever seen those posters that display different species' penises?" Durb asked. "This sort of reminds me of one of those."

I'd just served the second course, Crispy Fried Duck Tongue Salad, and we'd discovered, to our collective amazement, that a duck's tongue has a small bone at the base that runs the length of the organ, slowly transforming into cartilage.

A smallish man with square steel-rimmed glasses and a closely tended mustache, Durb Curlee looked positively priestly as he held his duck tongue bone aloft and pronounced: "There must be an art project to be made out of these."

He was right. I hadn't paid much attention to aesthetics when I picked up the tongues the day before at the Olive Farmers Market (where — don't ask me how — I'd managed to resist a package of pork uteri). Looking at them now, it struck me that the tapered length of cartilage was reminiscent of a miniature whale penis.

Abstract musings vanished with my first tongue-to-tongue contact. Maybe it's just me, but I find that when eating tongue it's hard not to anthropomorphize the animal that once relied on it. I wonder:

Is this tongue tasting me?

Am I kissing a duck?

OK, so maybe it falls short of erotic, but you're definitely eating something a bit more intimate than, say, a leg. After all, along with wings and webbed feet, the tongue is one of the primary means a duck has of navigating his world.

This is one important muscle. What's more: There's only one of it. Maybe that's why they're considered a delicacy in certain parts of the world. And I can see why — despite that penile bone, these crisp little tongues were one part muscle, two parts fat. Dressed with salt, pepper and crushed red pepper, then flash-fried in olive oil and butter, the tongues rendered their fat almost immediately, imparting each bit with a silky essence that tugged admirably against its crisp surface.

Ian, hunkered over his plate and de-boning his tongues with a practiced hand, deemed the dish a success. As he tossed a few tongue bones into the nearby woods, he assured me he could keep them down by the plateful.

He had a point: When your own tongue encounters this other tongue's bone, it's surprising, but as you skin it clean, any thoughts of this food's former role are tossed aside as you reach for the next tongue on your plate.

They were sort of like exotic French fries. Ellen, a petite, elegant woman born in Egypt to French parents, compared them to chicken wings — an apt observation, though I think the ducks of the world might take umbrage.

I liked them. Though I must say that if I were to make them again, I think I'd try higher heat and less oil. There's a lot of fat in these little tongues, and they get greasy awfully fast.

But I digress.

Skinning an eel is not child's play. Not by a long stretch.

After watching the fishmongers at Seafood City bag them, bash them into submission, slit their throats and relieve them of their innards, I thought the heavy lifting was over.

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