It is finals time and I am stressed. I have to write five essays totaling 25-30 pages, in French, by the 14th of December. So yeah, I am busy and that’s why I haven’t been blogging much.
Of course, some times when I get stressed I need a distraction; so during finals I like to cook. I know a lot of people like to bake cookies or brownies (or at least get baked/eat baked goods) when they are stressed, but I tend to envision elaborate meals that would make the chefs at Per Se and El Bulli jealous. So I decided to have some friends over from my program who I haven’t cooked with and who haven’t seen my apartment (or the big freaking Chateau de Vincennes three blocks away) and cook. Now besides a recipe for pumpkin and duck curry I was planning to make (the curry is really excellent by the way), I wanted to realize a dream I have had for a very long time.
I want to try horsemeat. I know this may be off putting, but I pride myself on trying every thing culinary at least once. I have eaten some weird meat before (alligator, bear, scorpion fish, turkey heart, you know, that kind of stuff) and since the French are really the only people in the western world who still have (or maybe ever had) a taste for horse, I figured this would be an essentially French thing to eat. To my surprise the super market I go to about 15 times a week sells horse. It’s called “Viande Chevaline” and somewhat inappropriately has a picture of Pegasus on the cardbord box. I don’t know why that freaked me out: we see whole dead chickens, fish and a lot of packaged beef meat in France has cartoon cows of in, but something about eating Pegasus seems very weird to me. There are a lot of famous horses (think Mr. Ed, That horse that was appointed to the Roman senate by Caligula, Bucephals the horse of Alexander the Greats, or the mythical Esquilax, the horse with the head of a rabbit and the body…of a rabbit) but there are no famous cows or chickens, something that may ease our minds when we feast on their flesh.
I bought the horse anyway and planned to serve it at my dinner party. Sophia, a friend who was coming over, loves to travel and has eaten some equally weird stuff and was very excited to try horse. I was thinking about marinating it in lime juice, garlic and herbs and then broiling the horse and serving it with maybe like a fresh salsa of tomatoes, onions and cilantro. Then, as I walked to the store where I buy my vegetables (its waaaaaay cheaper than the supermarket), I started getting very uneasy with what I was planning to do. I haven’t had any great horse experiences, but they are majestic and smart creatures and my friend/intellectual soul mate Caroline is an Olympic level horse back rider and would never speak to me again if I ate horse. Also, it’s not my house, it’s Gisele’s, and I don’t know if it’s polite to cook ethically dubious meat in someone else's house (“Don’t bother cooking tonight Gisele, I made enough Panda for everybody!”).
So I chickened out. I threw the horsemeat away and prayed for forgiveness. Maybe I still will try horse at some point, but anyone who likes to cook will tell you there is a big difference between eating something weird and cooking something weird. I just couldn’t cook the horse. I couldn’t imagine how awkward I would feel on, ya know, my next handsome carriage ride had I just a few weeks before prepared my own horse meat. Plus, I have a really great bit about why my parent’s should buy me a horse for life in downtown Philadelphia, and I can’t imagine telling it knowing what my ride tasted like.
Some things, like eating horsemeat, Barack Obama or white skinny jeans, are sort of better when we keep them as romantic dreams rather than experience them up close and realize that make us uncomfortable, probably need more experience in the Senate or make you look like a hipster douchebag.
Oh shit! I gotta get back to work!
No comments:
Post a Comment