Mexican meat is always an adventure
My stepmother will tell you: I am a lousy meat eater. My first pet was a rabbit and lamb should be bounding through fields bleating happily. I will not touch anything cute and/or little, and there are strict limits to the parts of the animal that I consider food. The further it is away from looking like the animal it came from, the happier I am. Insects might be low fat and high protein, but they’re still insects.
This past December, in the idyllic little town of Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, I ordered breaded fish. I was envisioning, in my charmingly naïve way, standard American-style fishsticks – why, exactly, I’m not sure, since the cuisine of this country does not in any way resemble anything as common as battered Highliner fishsticks – so you can imagine my shock when I was presented with the entire fish.
The last time I was presented with an entire fish was at a Thai restaurant with my father and stepmother. My father and I, juvenile little twits that we are, insisted on covering the head and tail of the fish with our napkins before we would even consider it as food. My stepmother was suitably horrified but not particularly surprised. I’m quite sure that the lingering memory of the head and tail underneath the napkins meant that she ate most of the fish.
So there I am in Tulum, facing Whole Fish #2. I am not impressed but I am staring down at its pointy little grin and boggling eyes and thinking, well, Erika, here’s your chance to expand your horizons. Come on, Erika, you can do it. It’s just a fish, after all.
Sure, I could do it. My squeamish inner child was ordered into her corner, and Pavel taught me how the fins have the taste and consistency of fishy potato chips, there are little pockets of meat in the cheek sockets, and you can bite the top of the head clean off. It was – dare I say it – bordering on active fun, perhaps as much due to its voyeuristic appeal as its flavour. I very nearly took the carnivorous-looking jaws of Whole Fish #2 home as a souvenir of my accomplishment.
The fish eyes and brain, for the record, were not consumed.
And from that moment I embarked upon a self-congratulatory endeavour of Trying Everything Once. An endeavour that might just have ended today.
There is a comida corrida – “running food” – around the corner from my work which offers a soup, a plate of pasta or rice, an entrée, a dessert, and all the fruit juice you can drink for 30 pesos or about $3 Canadian. It’s not deluxe food by any stretch of the imagination but it’s warm and salty and fresh and so vastly superior to sitting glumly in the office munching on a bag-flattened peanut butter sandwich that there is just no contest.
The daily specials menu is in Spanish always and without details, but usually I can decipher enough to know whether I would be eating chicken or pork. At first I clung to the faves and the familiars, but as familiarity grows so too does confidence and bravado. Today, I ordered two things that I did not recognize: “pata” and “carnitas estilo Michoacan”.
The first, the pata, turned out to be the gelatinous, baby pink, vaguely translucent meat from the ankles of a pig.
The second, the “carnitas” or “little meat”, well, I’m not entirely sure what those little Michoacan-style cubes were but I’m pretty sure I recognized stomach lining and heart. And something with a fair sized white tube poking out of it. And more pata.
I ate a lot of the free bread today.
It is the line between intellect and ideology. I actually think Mexicans have it right when they eat every little inch of the cow, from its ears to its tail: it is more environmental, less wasteful, and considerably more respectful to the poor little animal that was born to be food. And what, exactly, makes stomach so much less appetizing than thigh, other than some deep ingrained belief as to what does and doesn’t constitute meat? Shouldn’t I be embracing this new ideology?
Yet leave me with the nearly empty remains of Pavel’s pozole (a kind of soup), pushing the leftover pig’s eyeball around with my spoon with the morbid fascination of watching a crime scene, and I… just… can’t… do… it. Not yet, anyway.
But I’m trying. I am.
This past December, in the idyllic little town of Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico, I ordered breaded fish. I was envisioning, in my charmingly naïve way, standard American-style fishsticks – why, exactly, I’m not sure, since the cuisine of this country does not in any way resemble anything as common as battered Highliner fishsticks – so you can imagine my shock when I was presented with the entire fish.
The last time I was presented with an entire fish was at a Thai restaurant with my father and stepmother. My father and I, juvenile little twits that we are, insisted on covering the head and tail of the fish with our napkins before we would even consider it as food. My stepmother was suitably horrified but not particularly surprised. I’m quite sure that the lingering memory of the head and tail underneath the napkins meant that she ate most of the fish.
So there I am in Tulum, facing Whole Fish #2. I am not impressed but I am staring down at its pointy little grin and boggling eyes and thinking, well, Erika, here’s your chance to expand your horizons. Come on, Erika, you can do it. It’s just a fish, after all.
Sure, I could do it. My squeamish inner child was ordered into her corner, and Pavel taught me how the fins have the taste and consistency of fishy potato chips, there are little pockets of meat in the cheek sockets, and you can bite the top of the head clean off. It was – dare I say it – bordering on active fun, perhaps as much due to its voyeuristic appeal as its flavour. I very nearly took the carnivorous-looking jaws of Whole Fish #2 home as a souvenir of my accomplishment.
The fish eyes and brain, for the record, were not consumed.
And from that moment I embarked upon a self-congratulatory endeavour of Trying Everything Once. An endeavour that might just have ended today.
There is a comida corrida – “running food” – around the corner from my work which offers a soup, a plate of pasta or rice, an entrée, a dessert, and all the fruit juice you can drink for 30 pesos or about $3 Canadian. It’s not deluxe food by any stretch of the imagination but it’s warm and salty and fresh and so vastly superior to sitting glumly in the office munching on a bag-flattened peanut butter sandwich that there is just no contest.
The daily specials menu is in Spanish always and without details, but usually I can decipher enough to know whether I would be eating chicken or pork. At first I clung to the faves and the familiars, but as familiarity grows so too does confidence and bravado. Today, I ordered two things that I did not recognize: “pata” and “carnitas estilo Michoacan”.
The first, the pata, turned out to be the gelatinous, baby pink, vaguely translucent meat from the ankles of a pig.
The second, the “carnitas” or “little meat”, well, I’m not entirely sure what those little Michoacan-style cubes were but I’m pretty sure I recognized stomach lining and heart. And something with a fair sized white tube poking out of it. And more pata.
I ate a lot of the free bread today.
It is the line between intellect and ideology. I actually think Mexicans have it right when they eat every little inch of the cow, from its ears to its tail: it is more environmental, less wasteful, and considerably more respectful to the poor little animal that was born to be food. And what, exactly, makes stomach so much less appetizing than thigh, other than some deep ingrained belief as to what does and doesn’t constitute meat? Shouldn’t I be embracing this new ideology?
Yet leave me with the nearly empty remains of Pavel’s pozole (a kind of soup), pushing the leftover pig’s eyeball around with my spoon with the morbid fascination of watching a crime scene, and I… just… can’t… do… it. Not yet, anyway.
But I’m trying. I am.
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