Year of the Cow (26 page)

  
4.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the meat has browned and shrunk in from the edges of the skillet.

  
5.
Preheat the broiler to high.

  
6.
Pour off any excess fat that has accumulated in the pan, and blot the top of the meat with a paper towel until mostly dry.

  
7.
Spread a thin layer of Tomato Sauce over the surface of the meat, then add the mozzarella, onion, and olives, in the amount desired, and top with the basil.

  
8.
Broil for 5 to 10 minutes, until the mozzarella is lightly browned and bubbly.

  
9.
Remove to a cutting board and slice into pieces a little smaller than you think is appropriate. Remember: This stuff is filling.

Substitutions in toppings can be made as one would with any ordinary pizza. Roasted red peppers especially shine here. Stick to a topping or two, at most, for best results. And you'll probably want to stick to veggie toppings. Trust me on this one.

TOMATO SAUCE

Makes about 2 cups

4 cloves garlic, diced

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce, plus ½ can water

1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 tablespoon dried basil

1 bay leaf

  
1.
In a medium stockpot over medium heat, sauté the garlic in the oil until just fragrant, about 3 minutes.

  
2.
Add the tomato sauce and water, tomato paste, pepper, basil, and oregano, and stir gently to combine. Add the bay leaf.

  
3.
Simmer, covered, for 1 hour. Remove the bay leaf before using. Leftovers can be frozen for future use.

 

9

Heart

The thing about having an entire cow disassembled and packed tightly into a freezer in the backyard is that one discovers a tremendous variety of beef cuts one wouldn't ordinarily encounter. There's an awful lot of crazy stuff in that box. Among the familiar steaks and roasts, there are culinary emissaries from the great unknown. Tongue. Heart. Miscellaneous wiggly bits. Offal.

Foremost among the cuts I'd otherwise likely never encounter are cuts that most people don't think of as edible at all—bones. I have bags and bags of them. It turns out that a full-grown adult steer has a lot of skeleton rattling around inside it.

Today I'm using some of these bones in a braise. Specifically, shank. I'm braising a cross section of the leg of the animal, like a beef osso buco. However, osso buco is generally braised veal shank, not beef, so I'm calling this a fauxxo buco.

As the shank bubbles and gurgles on the back burner of my stove, I find myself in what's become a glorious by-product of the cooking process—spare time. Moments like this have become more common as I've been cooking more, but I'm still not used to them. I'm like a kid at a middle school dance. I'm standing there in my kitchen, glancing awkwardly around, unsure what to do with my hands. The dish is cooking, so I'm technically “working,” but I can relax, secure in the knowledge that I'm being productive. I have a few minutes to do something else. A rare, unscripted moment.

I can do anything I want.

I head back out into the backyard and sort through the packages of beef. I pull out a bag of bones.

Beef marrow bones are the leg bones of the steer; mine are sliced into about three-inch sections. They aren't especially common in American restaurants, let alone home kitchens, as a dish unto themselves. They are, however, one of the foundational elements used in making stock, as well as a key piece of equipment for keeping dogs occupied for long periods of time.

Fergus Henderson is the chef at the groundbreaking London restaurant St. John. He is justifiably famous for creating a nose-to-tail menu at his establishment, offering a culinary wonderland of dishes that diners would be hard-pressed to find almost anywhere else. Pig tails, duck hearts, lamb kidneys—and, yes, beef marrow bones—a cavalcade of weird and wonderful dishes, many uniquely British, all of them prepared with the utmost respect for the animal that gave its life for that meal.

In his excellent book
The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating,
he offers a preparation of Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad that I've been desperate to try. Now is my chance.

The dish is dead simple. Marrow bones, roasted until the fatty, unctuous marrow is wobbly but not rendered. Parsley, roughly chopped. Shallots, sliced thin. A small handful of capers. A vinaigrette of lemon juice and oil. And toasted baguette, sliced thin on the bias and smeared with the bone marrow, to hold it all. Toasted baguette is something I don't really do anymore, but I'm willing to briefly suspend my grain abstinence for the sake of making this dish properly. This baguette isn't some extruded puffed-rice, flavor-dusted concoction. This is made by a baker I trust, toasted at home, and piled high with greenery and fresh bone marrow that I prepared myself. This is a treat—and a rare one.

“Hey. What are you making?” My wife peeks in the door of the kitchen as I'm running a knife through a sea of emerald-green vegetation.

“Sit,” I implore, ignoring her question. “I made a salad.”

“With the oven?”

“It's a good salad.”

She smiles a bit, noticing that I'm being coy. She crosses her hands on the table expectantly.

I array the marrow bones between us, in a ring surrounding the parsley-and-shallot salad. “Bold move, Stone.” She looks from the bones to me. “We've always fed these to Basil.”

“Let's see what we've been missing.” I dig the marrow out of the bones with a butter knife. Then I pick up a slice of toasted baguette, smear the bone marrow across the top, and cap it with a pinch of the parsley salad.

We crunch down into our salad-on-toast. I've never had straight bone marrow before, but now I know this won't be the last time. It's phenomenal. It truly is God's butter. It's well worth briefly violating my prohibition against bread.

“Wow,” Summer understates.

“Yeah,” I reply. My eloquence knows no bounds.

“Why have you not made this before?”

“Because I'm not very smart.” Clearly. “I want to eat this all the time. I want this to always be in my mouth.”

She takes another bite. “I'm so happy right now.”

“Me too.” We chew in silence for a moment, then we each begin to giggle. It's that good. “I'm not giving these to Basil ever again.” We laugh like idiots, enjoying the unexpected pleasure of this unplanned culinary adventure.

“How did you make this?”

“I roasted bone marrow and ran a knife through some greenery.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“It sounds so easy,” she notes. She isn't wrong. “You should make this during the week.”

“I'd love to. But it just takes a little more time on a Thursday than we actually have, you know?” I crunch down on another bite. “I can barely start cooking by eight. Seven if we're lucky.”

“Yeah,” she says. “The by-product of a two-income household, I suppose.”

“Maybe.” I gather up some fallen parsley with a fork. “This is food, though. We should have enough time in the day to adequately feed ourselves.”

“We'll work on it,” she offers, reaching for another crust of bread. “In the meantime, we aren't starving. Don't be a downer.” She grins.

“Fair enough.” I laugh. “I'll save up my existential crises for later in the week.”

“There ya go.”

The fauxxo buco comes out of the braise butter soft and gloriously rich. I pair it with an easy reduction sauce and a quick gremolata—a bright little herb condiment pulled together from some finely chopped garlic, parsley, and lemon zest—and then play the whole drama out over a little pile of long grain and wild rice.

Summer and I laugh and talk—lingering over the meal, enjoying the moment. We pointedly don't talk about the next day or plans or boxes on our to-do list that we need to check off. In other words, we have a completely impractical conversation.

This dance with bones is my first step into offal. And it isn't awful at all.

*   *   *

For Valentine's Day, I'm giving my wife a heart. Not mine, though.

“Hey, there,” she says, sauntering up to me in the kitchen on the evening of February 13. “Are you cooking tomorrow?”

“I am. That okay?”

“Of course!” she says brightly. “Looking forward to it.”

I smile back. Were I a colder, crueler person, I'd remain silent. But of course I can't. “I was going to make you a heart.”

“What … like on a card?”

“Not exactly.” My eyes flick to the freezer out the door behind her.

Slowly, recognition creeps across her face. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, my.”

“It's Valentine's Day!” I offer. “I thought it'd be thematically appropriate.”

“Oh, it is,” she counters. “I'm just not sure it's romantically appropriate.”

“I have it on every authority that it will be delicious.”

“And every authority is…?”

“Eben.”

“Right.” She considers a moment. Finally, grimly, she nods. “Alright, I'm game.” She turns to leave the room. “You'll understand if I don't help cook, though.”

“Sure.” I watch her go, then turn to the fridge and withdraw a large rectangular package, wrapped tightly in butcher paper. I unwrap the heart and lay it on the counter. Examining the centerpiece of the circulatory system, I understand my wife's trepidation. Last time I wrangled a beef heart was in a sixth-grade dissection. Standing in Mrs. Parish's sixth-grade biology unit, a scalpel in one hand and a blood clot freshly excised from a bovine aorta in the other—the air thick with the acrid scent of formaldehyde. Dinner was the last thing any of us were thinking about.

Today, I'm not cooking a whole heart—my butcher has divided it up into sections. To my amateur eye, I'll be cooking the right atrium and ventricle. The piece in front of me is rectangular, a dark ruby in color, overlaid on the outside with irregular layers of hard white fat. On the other side, the interior of the chambers, a spiderweb of very firm, very fibrous tissue of some sort covers the surface. I have no idea what it is, but Zac would later tell me that they're the
trabeculae carneae,
Latin for “meaty ridges.” Appropriate.

Heart is a different sort of muscle from what I'm accustomed to. It's cardiac muscle rather than skeletal muscle. As a result, it has a very different texture from the kind of muscle that helps the animal move around. It's much denser and has a much finer grain structure. Per Eben's counsel, I'll have to clean it really well to get off all the fibrous tissue on the interior and exterior of the piece. I'm also told that it has a really pronounced flavor, and I'll be amplifying that flavor with an overnight marinade.

I'm making what in Peru is known as
anticuchos de corazón,
or marinated beef heart on a stick, grilled hot and fast. It's a common street food there, frequently noshed off carts by in-the-know locals or oblivious tourists. I'll admit, I'm a little wary of cooking this particular cut of beef, but I think it's something that I ought to do. I'm taking the responsibility of making the most of this animal that died to feed my family, and this is part of that transaction. And, if it's delicious, all the better.

First things first, though: I have to clean it. I pull a boning knife from my knife block. I need to trim off everything that isn't red and uniform. It takes the better part of a half hour for me to slice off all the fat, valves, and ropy layer of tissue inside the chambers.

Sometimes, when people buy beef at a supermarket, there's a red liquid inside the package, which they quite reasonably assume is blood. It isn't—the blood is all drained during the butchering process. That red liquid is a material called myoglobin—an oxygen-transport protein that's present in meat and is responsible for making red meat red.

Hearts have a
lot
of myoglobin.

My once white cutting board is stained red, as are my hands and part of the counter. There's also some on my shirt (I should have worn an apron), which I'm not especially happy about. A nearby glass bowl holds all the detritus and viscera we won't be eating. Glass was probably a suboptimal choice from a not-freaking-out-the-wife perspective. Because the bowl is clear, the glistening red jiggly bits are visible from any angle. A slasher film could shoot B-roll in my kitchen right now.

Once it's cleaned, I'm left with a few slim steaks that are very lean and very, very red. I knock together a marinade using the
aji amarillo
and
aji panca
pastes that I picked up at the Latin market. These pastes are unfamiliar to me—tiny jars of what could be mustard and ketchup but are made from yellow and red Peruvian chili peppers, respectively. The yellow,
amarillo,
is blatantly spicy, whereas the red,
panca,
is earthier, with a slower burn of capsaicin heat—the stuff that makes hot peppers hot. I add some cumin, pepper, garlic, olive oil, and salt to make a marinade. Finally, I slice the meat into strips, slip them into the marinade, and stash everything in the fridge overnight so the culinary chemistry can work its magic.