News

The Last Supper?

Continued from page 2

Wrong. An eel, slithery in life, is slippery in death. You need a supple pair of needle-nose pliers to remove the skin, and it's essential that when you slit the animal's throat you not cut too deeply. You see, that notch just below the fins is your only handle. Cut too deep, and as you're removing the long tube of skin, the head is liable to pop off, leaving you with nothing but a slippery flesh tube that's always eluding your grip.

But once skinned, decapitated, diced and breaded, these critters were on their way to becoming Eels, San Sebastian Style. Which is to say: stewed with roasted red and Anaheim chiles, pine nuts and parsley.

Flecked with red and green, the stew wasn't much to look at. It sort of sat there on the plate, a grayish blob. But that didn't stop our guests from praising the dish.

Jasmin said the eels were "earthy" — an assessment everyone seemed to agree with for a moment. Then Ian suggested that "muddy" might be more accurate.

This met with another round of instant approval, prompting Ellen to remark: "No wonder you're a food writer."

When I betrayed a tinge of self-doubt, they reassured me that "muddy" is a good quality for an eel to have.

That was news to me, but I figure if people praise edible mud, I must be doing something right.

Either that, or my guests were insane.

By now we were dining in the gloaming. The frogs were throatily serenading, and off in the distance a raccoon was picking over the discarded duck tongue bones.

Sure, the first three courses had been exotic, but they hardly rivaled the fetid intensity that marks much of what I ingest in the course of writing my weekly installments of Keep It Down! Then again, maybe the vat of Chuck Berry Strawberry Sangria I'd prepared to fuel our little enterprise had lowered our defenses. Sickly sweet with a quick tart punch, the wine blended nicely with the lemon, lime and orange marinating in the pitcher. The sangria left little doubt that the fourth course, Beef Tongue Served with Tomatoes, would be a knockout. (Of course, I had the inside track on this one, having followed a recipe from James Beard's American Cookery.)

Preparing a beef tongue is an experience that verges on the metaphysical. Not only must one boil it for hours and hours and hours, but there are few meats in the butcher case that look so much like they did in life. Think about it: Plucked and butchered, a drumstick bears little resemblance to the chicken appendage it once was. A tenderloin? You rarely see one untrimmed, and in any event it's a cut of meat that's invisible to the naked eye when it's on the hoof.

Not so a cow's tongue. From its lolling plane of coarse taste buds to its flaccid muscularity, all the way down to its crudely torn and fatty root, a tongue of beef looks pretty much like it did when it occupied its former home, but for the addition of a silver dollar-size USDA inspection stamp.

Not even four hours on the stovetop expunged that inky imprimatur from the skin of the tongue. It did, however, cause said tongue to surrender its bud-pocked skin as smoothly as a seasoned stripper sheds her polyester negligee. An hour later the tongues had absorbed every nuance of their tomato and olive stew. By the time meat hit plate, it was held together by nothing but a memory of its former self, and its gossamer flesh was melt-in-your-mouth tender.

It received high marks all around.

It was enough to give us hope that Keep It Down: The Dinner Party! may have found redemption.

Our religious leaders had abandoned us. But who needs the cover of the cloth when the animal kingdom has revealed that even its most derided bits are, in fact, bounty?

Our folly was quickly exposed by the final course: Durian Sorbet.

A large fruit with a hard and spiky shell, a durian doesn't exactly beckon the unwitting to sample its vomit-like flesh. This fruit takes butchering, and after you've split it open, you must ferret out the meat from the rind's many cavities.

It's not an easy fruit to prepare, and the smell — somehow simultaneously redolent of mangoes and a blend of all known human excreta — warns that your labor will be in vain.

Still, I had faith. I'd managed to purée the durian into a thick cream, to which I added simple syrup, a touch of lime and, for the sake of purity, a few shots of vodka. To top the dish before serving, I prepared a pomegranate reduction.

In other words, I did everything I could think of to accentuate the good in the fruit and mask the evil.

It didn't help.

Lulled into a false sense of security by the tongue course, my guests hardly noticed as I placed the dishes of sorbet before them.

One spoonful was all it took, however, to cause us all to very nearly wretch in unison.

"This makes me want to start smoking again," said Jasmin. "Anything to get the taste out of my mouth."

The bravest among us ventured a few more tentative tastes in hopes of unlocking the durian's secret allure, but the vile fruit defied us. Like the tongue bones before it, my durian sorbet headed over the railing — a poison feast for our foraging raccoon.

God bless him.

• 1
• 2
• 3