Every so often, the universe sets a number of strategically coordinated events into motion and their combined influences culminate in a sense of obligation to DO something – also known as a drive, a motivation, a calling. I have been the victim of such a cosmic prank in recent weeks and the result is a burning desire to post another entry to this here blog. So let’s talk about one of my favorite food subjects a little bit more… meat.
Don Jose, the papa of the paleteria where I eat lunch Monday through Friday, is somewhat of a local celebrity in Oxkutzcab. Known for his delicious “tacos de carnita (al estilo Michoacán),” he sells these homemade delights on festival days, during the feria de naranja, and quite frequently during the winter months as the tacos make for another form of income when demand for paletas is low. Often there is an obvious logic backing his decision to sell tacos on a particular day – something like an expected influx of people in Ox that weekend or Mexican Independence Day.
But since we’ve been experiencing cooler weather and, in the past three days alone, nothing but an overcast sky and extended intervals of non-seasonal downpours, I’ve come to realize that the production of carnitas is a bit of a personal hobby for Don Jose. A guilty pleasure, if you will. Two days in a row I caught him washing pig ears in the kitchen sink with the counter tops lined with bags of tomatoes and 3 kilos of habanero, jalapeno, and serrano peppers (there’s enough capsaicin in that bag to kill a pig). Don Jose, a sheepish grin spread across his face, looked back at me with an expression making it plain as day that, no, he didn’t put a sign out front yesterday informing the public that he’d be selling tacos today. This was a spur of the moment decision.
It’s as if some days, he can’t resist the urge to fry pig parts in a cauldron full of pig fat.
Don Jose frying pig parts in a caldron full of pig fat
I’ve tried to calculate an economic logic for cooking the carnitas with mathematically probing questions. The conversations end up going something like this:
“How much does the manteca cost?”
“Tres cientos (300) pesos.”
“And the pig parts?”
“Setecientos cincuenta (750) pesos.”
“How much is a taco? Or a torta?”
“Tacos son seis (6) pesos. Tortas, quince (15).”
“How much money do you make after selling all the meat?
“…no sé. (Insert characteristically sheepish grin here.)”
I’ve witnessed carnita-making-day in the past and found that while I thought my stomach capable of handling weird eats (consider my affinity for the meat market), the knowledge of what and how the meat has been cooked severely affected my ability to eat the final product and enjoy it. Without maintaining that mental separation between the two processes, that of the production of the carnitas and that of their consumption, my brain went haywire and did what brains do when they can’t reconcile binary opposites such as this one – nausea.
But any anthropologist worth their salt would be hesitant to offer an entirely structuralist argument for my initial reaction of wanting to vom at the thought of eating carnitas. We must also (and it pains me to write it) consider the psychology of the situation: Americans just don’t eat stuff like this.
To prove this point, and for science’s sake, let’s conduct an experiment. What’s your culinary gut reaction to this picture?
And this one?
I’d be willing to bet my bottom 13.5 pesos (a dollar) that the pig face creeps you out more than it makes your mouth water. That is, of course, assuming that you the reader (as if I have an audience that isn’t my mom or my boyfriend) are American and are only comfortable eating those parts of your meat when they’ve been chopped to tiny bits and squeezed into sausage skins or come in the form of a LSU Tiger stadium hot dog (don’t know about you, but that’s the only hot dog in the world in my book). And even then, you’d probably never admit to yourself that THAT’s what you’re eating. And at the very least, you certainly don’t want to see it.
Excuse me for making assumptions about you, dear reader.
When it comes to making carnitas, the rule of thumb is “cola a cara” – literally “tail to face”. Every part of the pig is used and Don Jose reminds me on a daily basis that the pig is the only animal that this can be done with, implying that we have an obligation to eat it and to eat it all. (Perspective: This is a bit of Don Jose and possibly rural Yucatecan wisdom not practiced by all cultures. Some societies find other animals acceptable “cola a cara” fare and others find the pig a complete abomination.)
Pig lungs being cleaned before their bath in the fat
When I say every part, I mean it – lungs, liver, feet, ears, heart, everything in the head and face (okay, exception – the brains. Those go to the hungry litter of local felines and it makes them go NUTS. Hopefully not literally.)
Yes, I did.
Having watched the carnita process for the first time a few weeks ago and failing in my duties as a cultural anthropologist by NOT trying them, I was thankful that Don Jose’s compulsion to make carnitas was especially tenacious this week. I had the opportunity to eat them on two different occasions and my good conduct even granted me the extra special privilege of trying tacos de cabeza de res (head of beef).
I spent all day Sunday shadowing Don Jose as he coaxed his cauldron of liquid pig fat (manteca) and roasted the bajillion tomatoes and peppers he uses to make his own salsas. In fact, I found that I could best participate in this whole process through the medium of salsa making because:
1. It’s one of my favorite things in the world.
2. Don Jose makes about five or six different kinds of salsas, each one specially made to compliment a particular kind of taco, meaning there was plenty to ask about and plenty to learn.
3. Someone has to peel the 30 cloves of garlic and rotate the tomatoes and peppers as they roast. And Don Jose had pig parts to deep fry.
For the carnitas, Don Jose makes three different kinds of salsas: a red salsa, green guacamole salsa, and a habanero picante salsa. The red salsa is “pura tomate”, meaning that Don Jose only puts roasted red tomatoes, cilantro, and 7 or 8 cloves of garlic in the salsa (and an absurd amount of salt; we have arguments about his salt intake). This salsa doesn’t have any added heat, but the combination of the roasted flavor of sweet Yucatecan tomatoes and garlic makes this salsa more delicious than anything you could imagine coming from your local TexMex joint. And I’m no Mexican food snob; it’s just plain fact that this salsa is GOOD.
Tomatoes after they've been roasted, waiting to be turned into delicious salsa roja
The green salsa, my personal favorite, has more of a kick to it. It consists of roasted green tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, roasted serrano and jalapeno peppers, a touch of vinegar, and avocado. There isn’t enough avocado in it to be considered guacamole, but it’s enough to slightly cool down all those serrano peppers aching to rampage on your taste buds. The effect makes this particular salsa dangerously addicting.
Green tomatoes waiting to be blended into a spicy serrano salsa
Finally, the habanero salsa is just that… blended up roasted habaneros. Sure, there’s a bit of water, vinegar, and salt (we’ll be real, a LOT of salt), but for the most part, this thing is straight heat. It’s delicious.
I found that falling in love with each of these salsas opened me up to trying the carnitas for the first time. After all, the carnitas were intended to be a vehicle for these salsas and if I put enough of them on there, maybe I’d be able to forget the texture of a particularly chewy piece of something I’m not entirely comfortable eating just yet.
So I watched Don Jose hack away at various pieces of the parts, selecting mostly parts that I could identify as meat that I would normally consume but also carefully adding a bit of liver, something with a grayish color to it, and what was definitely piece of a heart valve. He chopped it all up on his butcher’s block, combining the pieces into a practically homogenous pile of what looked like pulled pork. I could maybe make out the various parts if I wanted to, but I tried my best to do otherwise.
And it was delicious. Truly delicious, with a deep rich fatty flavor only complimented by the three different salsas I had smothered it with and the chopped raw onion and cilantro Don Jose threw on top. I almost forgot I was eating a piece of heart valve. Almost.
This is how my dinners have gone for the past three days and I’ve slowly become more comfortable with the marriage of what I know I’m eating and what my tongue is telling me about what I’m eating. Having conquered the carnitas and cabeza de res, variety meats seem more and more like something I could enjoy.
And then today, as I was checking the NPR food blog, The Salt, I came across this, an article titled “Chef’s Say Variety Meats, or Offal, Aren’t Just for Halloween”. Obviously intrigued, I hurriedly devoured the article, all the while suppressing the haunting feeling that April Fulton and Allison Aubrey have GOT to be stalking me.
(This is what I meant when I spoke of the universe playing its tricks. After reading about offal, the term used for parts of the animal that have “fallen off” the butcher’s block (as in, scraps), I felt as though the cosmos had presented my recent culinary adventures along side this article only to tie my hands behind my back and say, “You will write about this. And you’re welcome.”)
The article touches on this very subject but from the perspective of American chefs attempting to breathe some culinary life back into these neglected cuts of meat. It points out the comparably nutritious benefits of parts that we typically avoid (which made me feel better about how frequently I had been consuming these oddities, although I’ll bet the frying in pig fat part cancels those nutritious benefits out) and it echoes Don Jose’s argument for the economic sustainably that comes with consuming a whole animal. Chef Daniel O’Brien presents the consumption of offal as a moral obligation humans adopt once we’ve chosen to consume animals, quoted as saying, “If you’re going to cook an animal, you should make sure you utilize all the parts. It’s your responsibility.”
Don Jose taking out the brains from the tiny piggy skull. You can't see them,
but the ktties are by his feet, anxiously awaiting their treat.
Our responsibility… to eat the lungs of the pigs we kill. Well, he probably didn’t mean that, specifically. The point is that if we’re going to take from the earth, we need to be responsible about it. Waste not, want not.
The article also provides the United States’ ranking among countries of the world in per capita consumption of offal. Not to my surprise, we’re being shamefully outdone, coming in at a measly 135th place worldwide. I checked out the statistics site used to calculate that number and it provided HOURS of fun; they have everything on there, ranging from how many kg of cheese are consumed per capita annually for every country in the world to food price statistics and consumption habits of every continent for the past 50 years. It’s been bookmarked.
Anyway, I found out that the US consumes 1.14 kg of offal per capita annually. Mexico on the other hand clocks in at 5.50 kg of offal consumption each year, almost five times that of the US.
And just because it’s interesting - New Caledonia handled their offal most responsibly in 2007 with a somewhat nauseating figure of 21.67 kg. The country least likely to try a carnita that year was Maldives with only 0.03 kg and an apparently strong repugnance for anything that isn’t a filet mignon.
We can (and will) trace the US’s aversion to offal along a historical trajectory, ultimately realizing that the difference between us and Mexico comes down to money and scarcity – better cuts of meat are cheaper and more widely available in the United States. We could, in that same conversation, bring up a lot of interesting (and scary) issues that arise regarding actual meat quality as a result of the demand for better cuts and higher quantity. And we could consider how all of these things boil down to shape our culturally unique understandings of what is and isn’t acceptable to eat. But alas, that’s another blog post.
For now, I’ll let our thoughts rest on the carnitas… what they are for me, what they are for Mexico, and what they are for Don Jose.
What are they, you ask? Well for one, they’re delicious. They’re probably terrible for you based on commonly accepted standards of healthy food (the United States’ standards, that is). They’re a delicacy and a pastime. A hobby and a tradition. They’re made of both meat and offal (practicing our new vocabulary). They represent what some would call responsible consumption of an animal. They are a new experience for me in living abroad. And they’re a pretty solid product replacement for paletas in the wintertime, although we don’t really know that for sure.
The infamous caldron of pig fat. Don Jose will argue with me for hours, insisting that this isn't bad for you.
He also will try and convince you that there isn't any fat in mayonaise, beware.
Ultimately, the opportunity to try things like carnitas – those strange bits of foreign cultures that have the ability to unnerve and run up against your sense of do and don’t, right and wrong, good eats and not eats – that’s what traveling is all about. And whether you loved what you tried like I did (those salsa recipes are getting put into my family recipe book) or even if you hated it, a lo menos – you tried it.
Buen provecho, y’all.
