Blood and guts

My sister, who is an excellent cook, has recently begun experimenting with clay cookware.  A few days she sent me an email:  "I'm making a daube on Sunday; is omitting the orange peel a big no-no?"  She went on to explain that she had reservations about that flavor combination.  I could perfectly imagine her internal conversation:  orange peel with beef ?  I knew what she was thinking because we share the same mother and grew up eating the same food.  Our mom, born in Switzerland, is a very fine cook.  In fact, the quality of her cooking is outdone only by its conservatism.  Our mother has always been deeply distrustful of any unfamiliar flavor combination or ingredients that are hors norme--out of the ordinary.  After all, she is from the German-speaking part of Switzerland.  I never realized myself just how Germanic a country the U.S. is in its food tastes until I spent a few days in Cologne.  I could have been in Anytown, USA, twenty or thirty years ago.  Bad Italian was about the most exotic thing I found.

We Americans--despite the culinary revolution that has reigned over the Internet and other media more recently--are historically and inherently conservative eaters.  We're fearful, even.  We like what's on our plate to be familiar and recognizable--immediately classifiable in our internal structure of  referrents. 

So, witness what happened when I recently posted a recipe for pigeon with fresh peas and almonds on this website.  Normally, when I post a new recipe from my site to Facebook, I get a bunch of friendly comments.  This time, the silence was deafening!  Why?  Well, while pigeon with peas is a staple of French cooking, many of us Americans have never heard of eating pigeon.  And if we've heard of it, we haven't dared to try it.  I mean, we're talking about those dirty gray birds in city streets, right?  The ones that spend their time pecking at piles of dog poo?

To make things worse, I explain in the notes to the recipe that I had revisited the classic French recipe in which the pigeons are cooked whole in a sort of pot roast technique on top of the stove.  The result of the classic technique is that the succulent breasts of the pigeon become well-done, losing all their succulent charm and becoming dry and unpleasantly metallic-tasting.  For the pigeon, like the duck (another dark-fleshed bird) to be at its peak of perfection, the breasts must be kept rosy rare, and the thighs and wings must be well done to the point where the meat slips off the bone.  How to accomplish this?  Well, I address the quandary in my recipe.  But, the point here is that not only was I suggesting we eat pigeon, but I was suggesting we eat it rare!  So not only pigeon, but bloody pigeon!  Readers, your silence spoke volumes and, like my sister's email, got me to thinking about my own food taboos past and present.

I've certainly had my share of them.  After all, I was a near-vegetarian for many years.  It was only on deciding to move to France that I started testing the meaty waters, because from my visits to my future country, it was clear I wouldn't be able to share in the local culinary culture without embracing meat in my diet.  And then, meat in France--at least meat bought in artisanal butcher shops and hence raised by reputable producers--was just so damned good!  For instance, I hated lamb until I moved here.  But the opportunity to regularly consume non-factory-farmed meat wasn't the only reason my gustatory horizons were broadening.  It was also because--not wanting to be labeled a timid American--I began tasting so many different things!

Of all my food taboos, the most rigid one I've carried with me for the longest time has been against liver and blood.  It began when I was only 5 or 6 years old.  In those days, very occasionally my mother would cook liver--beef or calves' liver, I don't even know what you found at the local A&P back then.  (It makes me shudder just to think about it.)  I know at some time I was coerced into tasting a morsel.  I hated it; its metallic taste gave me the heaves and the mere smell of it frying in a skillet sufficed to make me flee the house.  Since liver--which if you think about it just looks like a giant blood clot--gave me the heaves, by extension I was sure that anything containing blood, like blood sausage, would have the same effect. 

It was only a couple of years into my French life that I tasted rare pigeon liver for the first time, cooked by yours truly to scatter over a grilled, spatchcocked pigeon.  I found it fabulous.  Likewise the tiny heart and gizzard (gizzards of all sorts had been on my taboo list since time immemorial).  Next, I tasted a mousse of chicken livers.  Still hated--and still hate--chicken livers.  However, I do love--no surprise!--foie gras.  (But let me be honest, I was so paranoid about liver that in my former life I would have refused to even taste foie gras.)

The most powerful food taboos are those against foods that you've never dared taste, because for one reason or another, they have a negative connotation for you.  Of course, the most obvious of these for many people is the taboo against organs of any kind (guts!).  For me, the most obvious organ is of course liver.  As you'll see, I've evolved, but I still have not conquered the liver kingdom completely.  However, there are also "sweetbreads," which are the thymus gland of calves.  I grew up eating and liking those, so no problem.  Now, kidneys. ..  When my friend Marina Fiore, a French-Italian who has lived for decades in Bloomington, Indiana, came to visit, all she wanted to eat was veal kidney.  Well, I wasn't able to sufficiently banish the thought that that's where the animal's urine is processed to bring myself to taste hers.  However, several years later, in a restaurant in the region of Bordeaux with a group of friends (face-saving, again), I did taste my pal Jerome's kidney.  And hated it.  So, is kidney now still one of my taboo foods, or has it crossed over the line into a simple dislike?  It's an important distinction because sometimes, a dislike can become a like.  (I hate to admit that since having my Facebook page I cannot hear or see the word 'like' without seeing that stupid little thumbs-up.)

About a year ago, Denis and I stopped for lunch in a rustic Corsican restaurant in the village of Lourmarin in Provence.  I love this place because  in cool weather, they always have a daily special cooked in a big marmite over a wood fire.  Well, on that particular day, the smoky special was a stew of red Corsican beans with figatelli, a famous Corsican sausage made from--you guessed it--pork liver.  I had always studiously avoided tasting it; its deep, dark red color warned me that I could never like it.  It was Taboo with a capital T.

But.  I love beans, and if I didn't take the special, I wouldn't get to taste the wood-fire dish.  I'd be relegated to something much more prosaic and boring.  So, taking a deep breath, I ordered the special.  I could always give the figatelli to Denis, I reasoned, and just eat the beans.  I was ravenous, as I always am at midday, and I quickly inhaled the beans.  The deep red curl of figatelli was left stranded in my bowl, looking cold and lonely.  I took a deep breath and cut off just a tiny corner of the loathsome sausage, put it in my mouth, and chewed.  To my amazement and moreover, my consternation, it was delicious!  I didn't just tolerate the taste, I actually liked it!  I, lifelong and committed hater of liver!  Of course, this was pork liver, and the Corsicans raise the best pork in the world.  Actually, they barely can be said to raise it.  They just let the pigs run free in the chestnut woods and hybridize with the local wild boars.  Ah!  I thought.  That's why I like this, because the pork is so good!  This rationale enabled  me to salvage my sense of personal integrity, for suddenly liking liver was like losing a piece of my persona:  the Person Who Hates Liver.

Every two weeks, we take a TGV (bullet train) from Paris to Aix-en-Provence, arriving around 7 in the evening.  The hour and half's drive from Aix to our house means that we can either have dinner in the small local restaurant near the house, or dine in Aix before heading north.  Now, Aix is a city of breath-taking beauty, but its reputation among tourists worldwide has pretty much stripped it of decent restaurants.  (There has always been one good place, Chez Feraud, but sometimes you want a change.)  Recently, we discovered a new place called La Cantine, which is owned by a Corsican. Their cooking is very simple, but the products they use--specifically the charcuterie and cheeses--are so fabulously good that the simple cooking is perfect.  It doesn't denature the excellence of the products.  Plus, the decor is almost miraculously sympathetic, a contemporary treatment of a beautiful old building that validates rather than obliterates the old interior.

The last time we went there, the waiter recommended the figatelli.  The owner had just, he assured me, brought it down from the Corsican mountains the day before and it was exceptional.  I took a deep breath.  This could be my first instance of intentionally eating a liver product.  "As you say it is so superb, I'll have the grilled figatelli," I bravely announced to the waiter.  Denis was watching me in amused amazement.

My dish arrived:  4 lusty pieces of the stuff, slit longitudinally, barely grilled, and presented on pieces of grilled bread rubbed with olive oil and a bit of tomato.  A huge portion.  Well, you can see what was left (photo above) after I started tucking into it.  I was literally moaning with pleasure, and Denis commemorated the moment by snapping a photo of my last piece of figatelli before it too disappeared.  The deliciousness of that figatelli defies description.  It's flavor was dark, earthy, robust and yes--smirks aside--virile even.  It was punctuated with little spurts of the most delicious pork fat.  It was, in a word, heaven on earth.  I spent the drive home replaying the tape of the experience of eating it in my head.  and, it being lunchtime, I'd give anything to be able to have that plate in front of me right now. 

There remained, however, the dietary specter of blood.  I'd eaten civets--stews of pork, hare, or wild boar thickened with blood, and while I was able to eat them, I didn't really like the taste.  But last week, I was again at lunch with Jerome and his gang.  We were having a prix fixe menu at the restaurant Spring here in Paris.  One of the courses was a morsel of blood sausage with bits of raw apple and radish.  Two pieces remained.  Who didn't have their boudin noir? someone asked, as the morsels had been presented all together on a platter.  "I don't think I like it," I stuttered unconvincingly.  "I don't like liver."  (Yeah, right.  Well, I hadn't quite adjusted to the fact that in fact I do, at least, like certain pork liver preparations.  I hadn't yet completely become that person.)

 I was thinking, "Blood!"

"Go ahead," someone else urged.  "I don't like liver either, but this is really good!" 

I stabbed the last piece with my fork.  I didn't hold my breath.  I chewed.  It was delicious.

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