Heat (11 page)

It was a modest breakthrough, and I was allowed to cook. The first item, appropriately enough, was lamb shanks. They were followed by beef cheeks, both basically cooked in the same way: browned and braised in a wine-based liquid until they fell apart. Then duck thighs, rabbit ragù, beef tongue, and guinea-hen legs. Once, cooking beef cheeks, I smelled that they were cooked, even though they were meant to remain in the oven for another hour. But I didn’t pull them out right away, which was a mistake and they were nearly burned, but I’d learned I could trust my senses.

8

I
FOUND
myself needing to understand short ribs, probably because I really didn’t know what they were, even though I was now helping Elisa prepare them every week and even though I recognized their overwhelming ubiquity: just about every New York restaurant of a certain pretension seemed to have them on the menu—and, in fact, has had them on the menu for fifteen years. In this is a rarely recognized thing, that cities have their restaurant dishes, some ingredient or preparation that mysteriously self-replicates (and yet rarely emigrates—until recently, you wouldn’t have found short ribs in Boston or Chicago) through the easy, professional promiscuity of chefs, always hopping from one place to another, never staying long, especially in Manhattan, which was also why Mario refused to give a job reference to anyone who left after working for him for less than a year. (“Why should I? So they can steal ideas it took me a lifetime to learn?”) The short rib lends itself to being appropriated because, in each appearance, it can be so effortlessly and thematically reinterpreted. It becomes Gallic when it shows up at a four-star French establishment (the short ribs, cooked in veal stock, are served with braised celery); vaguely fusion at a fancy four-star Euro-Asian place (on white rice, with bok choy and water chestnuts); a comfort food at the down-home but two-star Americana restaurant (with mashed potatoes and gravy); a piece of exotica at the cash-only Vietnamese spot (plastered on a stick of lemongrass and served with plum sauce); and bearing an Italian signifier—polenta, invariably—when Italian. At Babbo, it was also topped with a mound of parsley, lemon zest, and horseradish (because horseradish and beef are a traditional coupling, and because horseradish also provides the requisite heat, and lemon the citrus kick, required of a Batali dish). The dish also had an Italian name, Brasato al Barolo, which means “braised in Barolo,” Barolo being a hearty red wine from Piemonte in northern Italy.

A braised dish, a variation of the pot roast, is one in which meat is cooked with the lid on very slowly in liquid—wine or broth, or both—until it starts to fall apart. The meat is usually a tough cut like a leg or a shoulder, one of those gnarly, complex pieces that are chewable only if they’ve been hammered for several hours. In Italy, braising has long been a winter preparation, associated with house-heating wood stoves and subdued root vegetable flavors. (Braised meats, for instance, feature in the peninsula’s oldest cookbook,
De re coquinaria,
written in Latin around the time of Christ by Marcus Gavius Apicius, who also recommends the same obliterating approach for wild ducks and desiccated, tough, otherwise inedible game birds.) The thing about Babbo’s Piemonte version is that you’d have a hard time finding a
brasato
made from short ribs, with or without Barolo, anywhere in Piemonte, and Mario, when pressed, concedes that there might be a little invention in the dish’s name. Like me, he didn’t have a clue what a short rib was until he ate one on a wintry night in 1993 at a restaurant called Alison on Dominick Street, where, as it happens, it was prepared in the North African style, with couscous. In a sign of our jaded how-can-I-give-you-my-heart-when-it’s-already-been-broken era, the candlelit Alison on Dominick Street—which, as recently as Valentine’s Day 2002, was regarded as New York’s most romantic restaurant—has closed, but I tracked down one of its former chefs, Tom Valenti. At the end of the eighties, Valenti had scored big making a dish with lamb shanks, same principle: a cheap, worked muscle (the shin) was cooked in wine and broth until the meat fell apart when tapped with your tongs, and the result was so popular, and so imitated, that Valenti found himself looking around for another meat to prepare in the same way. “I wanted to do something with beef but never liked beef stew. I found it dry and chewy. So I did some homework and came across old recipes using short ribs. I liked short ribs much more than any other beef cut: they are rich and marbled and full of so much fatty flavor that they never dry out.” When he put the dish on the menu, in 1990, it was accompanied by a small fillet—” technically, a beef dish done two ways, which I did so people would have a choice in case they hated the short rib.” Valenti now runs his own restaurants, and short ribs are a regular feature—except for a brief six-month period when he took them off the menu and “got lots of shit from customers.” In 1990, short ribs were forty-five cents a pound; now, thanks to Valenti, they are more than five dollars.

But what is a short rib, and where do you find it on a cow? Elisa didn’t know, and she’d been preparing them for four years. Even Valenti wasn’t sure; his short ribs, like Babbo’s, were prepared by the meat guy and arrived as a shrink-wrapped unit of three or four. So I went to my local butcher, Benny, at Florence Meat Market in the West Village, and he explained. There are thirteen bones on each rib cage, he said. Six of them—the longest and the meatiest—are prime rib: these would be your standing rib roast. (This is probably what Tom Jones was eating when seduced by Mrs. Waters—a great chunk of meat on a bone you can hold with two hands.) But three or four bones at the bottom of the rib cage and another three or four at the top, near the shoulder, are shorter. These are short ribs. And this is why they’re delivered by the butcher in units of three or four: three or four from the bottom and three or four from the top, although the ribs at the top are often too fatty to use.

For all that, the ribs aren’t all that short—they’re about a foot long. They’re also surprisingly meaty, akin to pork spare ribs, but with a lot more to eat.

You start by browning them. You remove them “from the
top
of the packaging,” Elisa reminded me after I’d already slid them out from the side, “so you don’t get blood all over the front of you”—because, of course, by then, I had blood all over the front of me—and then separate them, one by one, by slicing down through the meat between each rib. “Carefully,” Elisa said,
“please.”
You set your ribs out on a hotel pan and season them with salt and pepper abundantly on both sides: they look freckled when you’re done. (A hotel pan, I understood finally, is not actually a pan but a tray, and gets its name from being one of the largest trays that can fit on an oven shelf, the kind of very large tray that a hotel would need.)

At Babbo, they cooked up about three cows’ worth of short ribs at a time, around forty-eight, but a quarter of them always turned out to be impossibly fatty and unusable, or else crooked, mutated, and very ugly—and unusable. (Christ, I found myself saying, holding up some dwarfed, battered boomerang specimen, wondering if pasture pastimes included bovine boxing, What happened to this cow?) This is the nature of the cut—some are just mutant—so if you’re preparing short ribs at home you want twice what you think you need: say, eight ribs for four people. You can do other things with the bits you don’t use—at Babbo, the discarded meat, shredded by hand and mixed with parmigiano, becomes a ravioli stuffing, unless Cesar gets to it first, in which case chili flakes and cayenne pepper are added to make a fiery filling for family-meal tacos, with white-flour tortillas grilled on an open flame.

By now, it is widely recognized that you don’t brown meat to seal in the juices; you brown it for the flavor. The misplaced belief, in which a crunchy outside was seen as the protein equivalent of Saran Wrap, arose in the nineteenth century out of the untested speculation of a German chemist, Justus von Liebig. The theory was that a seal is created when protein coagulates at a high temperature, just as when bleeding wounds are cauterized, and it gained popular acceptance as a scientific justification for what was seen as the new cooking method of the moment: hot and fast, rather than the traditional slow and wet. Remarkably, it went largely unchallenged for more than a century, until 1984, when chemist and cookery writer Harold McGee confirmed that no such seal exists and that we brown our meat simply because we like the taste.

With meat, browning is the result of proteins breaking down under heat—the surface is caramelized (it literally becomes sweeter and more aromatic) and the texture changes—but this doesn’t occur until the temperature reaches at least 340 degrees Fahrenheit. As it happens, cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil starts smoking at 360 degrees, so I suppose, if you are scrupulous in these matters, you could find happiness inside this twenty-degree buffer zone and brown your meat in olive oil without polluting the kitchen and the lungs of your colleagues. This, alas, was not the way at Babbo, where you were told to take a big, heavy-bottomed pot—a “rondo,” about three feet in diameter—place it on the flattop, and pour olive oil inside once the bottom was smoking. The first time I did this, I hesitated. I peered over the rim of the by now very, very hot rondo, a rib in each hand, like pistols about to be drawn in a game of cowboys and Indians. The olive oil had acquired a hot liquidy quality, and some molecular thing seemed to be going on, and the oil was moving around in currents. I had not seen olive oil currents before, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. As I stood there, I heard a voice, a tiny one, coming from a little man residing in the back of my brain whom I’d always regarded as Mr. Commonsense. Mr. Commonsense, who also had not gone to cooking school, was telling me that I didn’t want to stick my hand into the bottom of a very hot gigantic pan, so hot that it was spitting oil, did I? Of course not. So, as I made to set my ribs inside, I dropped them just before they reached the bottom. The ribs landed. They bounced, splashing in the hot oil, which then seemed (in my mind, anyway) to
roar
up the length of one of the ribs, leap off the end and explode, enveloping my knuckles. The pain was remarkably intense, and my skin responded immediately by forming globe-like blisters on the tender area between the back cuticle end of the fingernail and the first knuckle. Four of them, one on each finger. These globes were rather beautiful, not unlike small shiny jewels.

Okay, so I learned something that I’m sure every other person in the world already knew: hot oil was not for splashing in, bumpy landings strongly not advised. I had forty-six more ribs to go, and these, I concluded, would be eased down into the bottom of the pot. But there was a problem. The jewel-like globes at the ends of my fingers were now extrasensitive to the heat (not unlike an inverted case of frostbite), and the closer I brought them to the hot bottom of the pot, the more they protested. An extraordinary thing then happened: just as I was about to lay down another rib, my fingertips, like little pets that had got loose from their leash, ran off on their own and dropped the rib. Once again, it bounced. Once again, there was a splash. And once again hot oil roared up the bone, leapt off the end, and exploded, enveloping, this time, not my knuckles but the shiny jewel-like blisters that were on them. Blisters on blisters. The process was akin to what I was trying to do to the meat—break down the protein in the tissue with high heat. But this thought occurred to me only later. At the time, I had only one thought: to remove myself from the source of the pain. I became airborne. I shot straight up, ramming my maimed knuckles into my crotch (no idea why men do this—do we expect to find comfort there?) and howled. By the time I landed, I was surrounded by several Mexican prep chefs, staring at me with compassion but also with a clear message: You, señor, are actually very stupid. Cesar handed me his tongs.

Use these, he said.

Of course. Another lesson learned: use tongs.

After the browning, the rest is straightforward. Actually, with tongs, the browning, too, is straightforward. There are five remaining steps.

One.
Remove the now brown and glistening ribs (using tongs,
por favor
) from the rondo and make a braising liquid, the stuff that’s going to cover the ribs while they cook. In this method, the liquid is the essential ingredient, and it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s wet and plentiful (in an Irish pot roast, it’s water), although the ideal liquid is both flavoring and flavorful and is made from one part wine (at Babbo, about three magnums’ worth, which, as it happens, is not the Barolo of the dish’s name but a perfectly acceptable, very cheap California Merlot) and one part meat broth (say, a chicken stock), plus loads of vegetables: some carrots, an onion, two stalks of celery, and five peeled cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped, which you throw back into the rondo, still hot, and stir. You add the wine, the broth, a can of tomatoes, and cook for a few minutes.

Two.
Put the now-browned ribs in a roasting pan, pour the braising liquid over them, add some rosemary and thyme, put a lid on top, stick it in the oven (350 degrees), and forget about it.

Three.
(Three hours later, the ribs now cooked.) Turn the braising liquid into a sauce, although the instruction itself raises an obvious question: what is a sauce? In this preparation, for instance, this is what you do: first you remove the ribs and set them aside to cool; then you pour the liquid they were cooked in through a strainer into another pot. This liquid, even before you’d begun cooking the ribs in it, had been pretty rich, being a broth that had been made from chicken feet, plus lots of vegetables, herbs, and plenty of wine.
Then
the ribs themselves had been cooked in it. (The bones of any animal, simmered slowly, make for a wet, intense expression of the meat; here you’re getting a double expression, like a broth made from a broth.) Next, you take this dense, aromatic, already highly extracted liquid and hammer it: you put it back on a burner and boil it to hell. Just torch it. Full blast. Lots of yellow-frothy melted fat will rise disgustingly to the surface. You skim this off and keep boiling the thing until it’s reduced by more than half, when, lo and behold, it is no longer a braising liquid or a broth: it’s a sauce. The result is very, very, very concentrated. (In fact, it’s really almost French.)