Nick Bergus

My main course could have been called the Depraved Platter — veal sweetbreads and foie gras. Oh yes, Wild Rice mostly lived up to expectations.

Sweetbreads—which can refer to either the thymus, like the ones I ate, or the pancreas of calves, lambs or pigs—are much meatier than I expected.

These sweetbreads were crusted with almonds and, I assume, baked. They had a much subtler flavor than I expected, too. My mother and I debated the correct pronunciation of the word offal. (She preferred oh-fell while I believed it to be the same as awful.)

Dinner began with an amuse, in this case a cold grilled beef and corn salad with avocado and crème freîche. It had a nice meaty flavor and a mostly chunky texture that contrasted with the fatty smoothness of the avocado and crème freîche.

The first course was a delightful assortment of six different cheeses ranging from a hard sheep-and-goat cheese from to a creamy blue from . Paired with wild rice and nut bread and a cranberry-orange it was divine. But how can you screw up an uncomposed cheese course?

Portions had grown in the four years since we ate at the restaurant and the quality of service declined. Our waitron was a part-timer who admitted she waited tables only part time and seems to think that making a distinction between fungus and mushroom is ludicrous. We also perceived loss of focus on fresh and season ingredients.

Following organs for dinner, I felt I deserved the most clichéd dessert on the menu: crème brulèe.

Propped up by the bucket of a skid loader, the cow was in obvious distress. Her belly was bloated; a blue tongue stuck out of her mouth as she panted and belched; snot and a trickle blood ran from her nostrils. The three men looked at the downed cow much the way the same group might bend over the hood of an ailing pickup truck.

One of the men, a farmer from down the road, saw her lying on her side in the sun as he’d driven by, noted she didn’t look good, and stopped. The second, the first’s second cousin and contractor who owned the cow, had arrived after a quick phone call. The third, a butcher-turned-laborer, arrived a couple minutes later. Each had his own expertise and suggestions.

The 14-year-old cow had fallen in a slight depression in the pasture. It was possibly from the bull trying to mount her, possibly she just collapsed. But with her head slightly down hill and with the sun beating down on her black hide on a 90-degree day, she started to puff up.

Quickly it was clear that the men were too late. Even after they had helped her onto her side with the skid loader, she refused water and wouldn’t stand. The cow could do nothing to beat the flies off her eyes or back. Then she started to low.

For several seconds she let out intermittent, throaty bellows, and then slumped over, her left eye glassy and unblinking.

“She’s gone,” said the butcher.

“She didn’t have a chance, really,” said the farmer.

“Fuck,” said the contractor.

On our just-completed vacation, we spent four days in Maryland with my mom’s side of the family in a beautiful house on the Miles River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, apparently own homes near by. We still had a nice time.) Josh, my retired-chef cousin, steamed two bushels of blue crabs for the 30 people. Lots of fun.

The crabs in this video went into the pot much more willingly than many of the others. It often seemed that for every one that went in, two would escape. It was necessary to chase them down and force them back into the pot. Meanwhile another one would escape and the process would repeat.

Well, back to shoveling pig shit tomorrow.

As a piece on Serious Eats points out:

The U.S. is a country whose national cuisine might as well be the hamburger. How pathetic is it then that such a specimen made with fresh beef and grilled onions is considered ‘gourmet’?

Indeed. Let’s not forget the decline of the peanut butter and jelly (and grilled cheese) sandwich either. Americans choose convenience over quality long ago. Sigh.

Today on Onion Radio News is a story with the headline “Entire Meal Pig-based.” Mmmm, a tasting entirely made of pig. (The idea of entire meals featuring a single ingredient has always appealed to me.)

Onion Radio News is no Splendid Table, though. Everyone knows a true pig feast wouldn’t end with a “hamhock crème brûlée” but rather with a pie contained by a lard-filled crust.

I think it’s important to have some connection to where our meat comes from. This isn’t to say we should completely avoid Taco Bell, Wendy’s or other supporters of factory farming. But we should at least recognize what our meat goes through before it shows up at the grocery store, restaurant table or drive-through window.

So last night when I did a cooking demo and food writing talk at a small public library just north of here as part of its adult summer reading program, I really pushed it. I read, in quick succession, a few pieces about animal death. Pieces I really love. Perhaps against my better judgment, I shared these, in longer forms, before I cooked and we ate.

First E.B. White’s 1948 essay, written prior to Charlotte’s Web, “Death of a Pig”:

The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom-time, feeding through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.

Next came Anthony Bourdain’s chapter “Where Food Comes From” from his book A Cook’s Tour:

They finally managed to wrestle the poor beast back up onto the cart again, the guy with the mustache working the blade back and forth like a toilet plunger. The pig’s movements slowed, but the rasping and wheezing, the loud breathing and gurgling continued… and continued…the animal’s chest rising and falling noisily… continued and continued…for what seemed like a fucking eternity.

And then Michael Ruhlman as the voice of Thomas Keller in “The Importance of Rabbits” from The French Laundry Cookbook:

One day, I asked my rabbit purveyor to show me how to kill, skin and eviscerate a rabbit. (…) He showed up with 12 live rabbits. He hit one over the head with a club, knocked it out, slit its throat, pinned it to a board, and skinned it—the whole bit. Then he left.“I don’t know what else I expected, but there I was out in the grass behind the restaurant, just me and 11 cute bunnies, all of which were on the menu that week and had to find their way into a braising pan. I clutched at the first rabbit. I had a hard time killing it. It screamed. Rabbits scream and this one screamed loudly. Then it broke its leg trying to get away. It was terrible.

Then we cooked pork chops from a farm, Pavelka’s Point, that I’ve been visiting this summer. Everyone one ate them and the chops were fatty, juicy and delicious.

Today I watched the slaughter of more than a ton and a half of pigs.

The slaughterhouse was one of the many small so-called “official” processors across Iowa. Here, I watched the butcher stun, stick, skin and split five 280-pound hogs and three 700-pound sows.

It was a simple routine. The butcher drove each pig into the slaughtering room’s 3-foot by 8-foot pen, looked each pig head on before shooting it between the eyes.

Convulsing followed but no squealing. In just seconds, the butch returned the gun to the rack by the eastern door, picked up his curved 8-inch knife, stuck it into the pig’s throat and opened its neck. Surprisingly bright red blood flowed into the circular floor drain a couple of feet away.

When the pig was reasonably bled, the butcher wrapped a chain around its hind legs and used a winch to lift the carcass and lay its back on to a stretcher-like table for butchering.

First, he severed the pig’s spinal cord. Next, he removed each foot, taking with it skin from the chest and belly. The head was then removed completely. These pieces all went into a 60-gallon or so gray bucket labeled “inedible.”

Then the butcher began skinning the pig, starting in the middle. With the skin removed from the pig’s belly and sides, he took a saw — it resembled a chainsaw — and cut through the breast plate and pelvis with two quick strokes. A knife through the midsection opened the hog’s body cavity, exposing the steaming organs. These were scooped out, inspected and put into the gray “inedible” bucket. The butcher hoisted the pig up, this time by a metal hanger hooked through both hams, fully removed its skin and sawed the pig in half.

Finally, the butcher transferred the hog halves to meat hooks hanging from a rail on the ceiling. Another cutter weighted the carcass and the state inspector stamped in the pork in purple before it was moved into the refrigerator.

The whole process was quiet, really. Besides the sound of the gun immediately followed by the sound like a water-filled balloon as the hog hit the concrete floor, the loud whirr of the saws and the spray of a hose to rinse everything, the butcher worked quietly.

The sows, which nearly filled the pen and required two men using an enormous bone saw to split in half along the spine, thrashed the most. One flipped from one side to the other and kicked the wall for a couple of minutes. Another, hoisted by its back legs attached by a chain to a wench on the ceiling, jerked around so much I was afraid it would fall the three feet back to the floor.

I don’t know what it says about me that I don’t feel disturbed by the ordeal.

Even seeing a headless, skinless, split-in-half lifeless carcass’s muscles still twitching didn’t bother me (though at first I thought I was seeing things).

The only lasting effect is that I can’t get the scent of pig shit out of my nostrils.

Frank Bruni, The New York Times’ restaurant critic, wrote on this on his blog today:

The most pleasurable meals aren’t about the rarity or quality of the food and the setting. They’re about the indulgence of eating when you didn’t intend to in a place you just trip across.

Truer words…

On a spring day in the Tuscan countryside — this story starts idyllically but you should soon realize it wasn’t — when I was trying to keep from vomiting what little was in my stomach as I sat in the middle of the backseat of a “large” European sedan between two other adults as we drove over roads with bumps that, in Iowa, are called hills.

Finally, we stopped in a little town whose name I will never know. There, desperate for something to eat, we went in to a wine bar where the proprietor was halfway through his lunch: a bottle of red wine.

We ordered lunch. It was simple. It was safe. Tomato soup and bread.

I have been trying to find food that lives up to that meal ever since.