2006-03-28 - 3:36 p.m.
Last weekend I ate a couple of unusual things. My mom came to town to visit and we mostly ate out. Saturday night, I took her to dinner at a very ritzy restaurant. They were having some sort of foie gras fest and had a bunch of foie gras dishes on the menu. Now, I realize I shouldn�t eat foie gras at all. It�s really bad for you and creating it requires forcing huge amounts of food down geese�s throats until their livers inflate to ten times normal size. This cruelty is supposed to lead to a delicacy?
I thought foie gras was already outlawed in Chicago. A ban on it was progressing through the city council. In fact I remember some restaurant workers noting a few months ago how ridiculous and hypocritical it was that the ban on foie gras seemed to be making more political headway than a proposed ban on smoking (although the smoking ban has since passed). But apparently the dish is still available for now, although I don�t think many places offer it.
So I guess I made a conscious choice to sin, ordered it off a menu. I should have asked for a side of theft and adultery with covetousness sprinkled on top. Eating foie gras is like being an anti-vegetarian. Okay, I�m feeling worse and worse about it. No more bloated livers from tortured geese for me in the future. But getting it made sense at the time because it wasn�t just any foie gras. It was foie gras lollipops.
No, really. Balls of foie gras dipped in colored and flavored sugar standing up on the ends of sticks. Savory/sweet combinations are hard to successfully pull off (as this one was). But when they work, they�re so delicious. I could gush about the contrast between the smooth unctuousness of the foie gras and the crunch of the sugar grains. Or between the salty interior and the sweet outside. But I�d probably just gross out readers who are more sensitive to animals. Hell, I�m kind of grossing out myself at this point.
The other unusual dish I ate last weekend should redeem me a bit. It was a cow�s foot. This is obviously a part of the animal that�s usually just thrown away. I was intrigued by the apparent efficiency of a restaurant serving something that�s normally waste to customers. I have no moral qualms about eating animals; I�m a firm believer that humans are the top of the food chain. However, the ridiculous processing and factory-farming that goes on gives me shivers.
Beef infected with mad-cow disease because the cattle are fed with the ground up carcasses of other cattle? A fast food nation of diners who don�t even know how much feces and union-busting goes into their burger? Dude, I just want a juicy steak without all that bullshit. Why are you messing with that, McDonald�s? More pertinently for the issue at hand, the wasteful way we consume animals leaves me horrified. �Cook the breast, toss the rest� they say in restaurant kitchens. Well, I was going to see if �the rest�, in fact the very last part, was palatable.
We were at a Korean place next door to Nya�s theater for lunch. A lot of the dishes on the menu had initial double-consonants in their name, like �ddeok� and �jjiang�. I don�t think the �roasted cow�s foot� had such a name in Korean, but I knew I had to have it when I saw it on the menu. I mean, regular cuts of meat you can get anywhere. But how often do you get a chance to eat hoof? Sweetbreads and other offal ain�t got nothing on this.
Of course to successfully order it, I had to convince our waitress (who had pretty limited English skills) that that was really what I wanted. We basically engaged in a pantomime exchange. She looked dubious that some crazy white boy would order such an item and scowled and shook her head. I nodded and smiled and gave the thumbs-up sign (all while my mom and Nya were trying vociferously to discourage this course of action). Eventually the waitress capitulated, laughing. Hoof was mine!
I was first brought a big bowl of lemony broth with glass noodles and scallions. I tried to gesticulate a question to the waitress. Should I put the hoof in the soup? She shook her head; it was a separate course. The cow�s foot itself sat on another plate, unexpectedly large. I wasn�t sure how I should eat it. The waitress seemed to sense this and got a pair of scissors to cut it apart. She left me a plate of the cut off bits of meat and took away the bone. I dug in.
It was surprisingly good. To call the edible bits �meat� here seems a bit inaccurate. It�s more like some sort of connective tissue or tendon, but not gristly or gnarly like you might expect. Rather it�s sort of gelatinous, chewy and toothsome without being tough. It obviously wasn�t roasted, but boiled or cooked by some other moist process. It must have taken quite a while. Whatever muscle fibers there were had been completely broken down to a smooth jelly-like texture. (Then again, it�s a hoof so maybe there weren�t any muscle fibers to begin with.)
Most weird organ meat just tastes like a gamier version of the main cuts of whatever animal it�s from, only smoother or maybe more striated. This did not. It tasted, well like nothing I�ve ever had before. I�m told that in Japan they discovered other flavor receptors on the tongue besides those for salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. Apparently these pick up on what is described in Japanese as �umamu�, but seems to have a perfectly good English equivalent in �savory�. These taste buds detect the flavor of steak or of mushrooms.
The taste of cow�s foot may be a perfect distillation of umamu. I�d encourage you to eat more hoof, if you eat meat. This taste is really why you�re a carnivore. If you�re going to eat meat, go all the way. Chicken breast really isn�t particularly flavorful and you�re taking something�s life anyway when you consume it. What�s the point? Plus y�know, things taste just a little better when you have to work to order them�
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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