Sex and Bacon (13 page)

(The last time I made Fancy Sauce for a guest, I noticed his come tasted like fresh garlic the next morning. It was like comefredo sauce! I felt like I was having sex in an Olive Garden! This may not be to your preference, so be warned, and take the shot on your tits accordingly if you’re not into the prospect of garlic-flavored man-butter the morning after your Fancy Sauce dinner date. I can only assume that my cooch tasted of garlic similarly, but I did not choose to
deglaze my own pan
that morning so that knowledge is, unfortunately, lost to history.)

THINGS I’VE EATEN THAT MOST PEOPLE PROBABLY HAVEN’T:

I.

I was supping with a friend in a restaurant in downtown Seattle. His fiancée was a staunch vegetarian, so when he and I went out to eat we always picked restaurants that featured meat and more meat. She knew about our
affaire de viande
and indulged him in his occasional bacchanal, as long as he brushed his teeth vigorously afterward and didn’t come home with animal leftovers. I was his partner in crime for all meat-related offenses, a temptress of beef and pork. When we went out it was always Carnival. We ate flesh like robber barons, picking our teeth and groaning.

Steak was old hat, so we’d met at an upscale Brazilian restaurant famous for a particular dish fe’w other local restaurants had the guts to offer. Its menu called the dish “grilled sweetbreads,” which I knew were offal—but what kind? Could Brazilian sweetbreads be similar to Mexican
tripa
or Scottish haggis?

I was pretty sure I didn’t want to eat another animal’s intestines. A living creature’s intestines are, essentially, sausage casings full of shit—and no matter how much you soak and rinse them after butchering the beast, the rubbery membranes are still haunted by the Ghost of Shits Past.

I wasn’t even into analingus -with my o’wn species. I mean, I was ‘willing to get my o’wn asshole licked ‘when I had to in pursuit of a good lay, but I wasn’t about to pay $20 for the privilege of ingesting a portion of cow GI tract, “grilled “ or not.

I read on. The menu text describing the plate specified that the innards in question were, in fact, a calf’s pancreas gland.

Well, that was completely different!

In humans, the pancreas is a long organ that wraps around the stomach and secretes both digestive enzymes and glucose-regulating hormones. The word
pancreas
comes from the Greek words for “all flesh “ or “all meat,” reflecting the pancreas’s uniquely spongy, cutletlike composition. Furthermore, the pancreas is high up enough in the gastrointestinal system that it doesn’t have anything to do with shit. It’s just an innocent organ, pumping out chemicals. The enzymes and hormones it secretes are
preshit
.

I had to try some. I figured that something called “all meat” must be at least a little bit delicious.

When the Brazilian waiter came I ordered the sweetbreads.

“You are sure? “ he asked. “It is, you know—” he gestured vaguely at his stomach.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s
pancreas
.”

The waiter looked doubtful. “Yes?”

I smiled. “It’s part of the
digestive system
. But it’s not directly involved with the production of actual—”

My friend kicked my ankle under the table.

I closed my mouth and folded my hands. “That’s all,” I said. “Thank you.”

Our waiter shrugged, retrieved our menus, and disappeared.

Eventually, our food showed up —delivered by the busboy.

“Thank you!” I said. “I’m really looking forward to trying this.” I pointed at my plate, heaped with rice and grilled meat.

“No English,” he said determinedly. He deposited a full basket of bread on our table and fled.

Without further ado, I dug into my pile of cow innards.

Grilled pancreas tastes like bacon but has a tender, melt-away texture not unlike its fellow internal organ, liver.
¹
Eating grilled pancreas is a lot like eating bacon-flavored scrambled eggs: The texture is so delicate it tends to fall apart when you try to use a fork. After a few mishaps, I learned to heap my pancreas onto pieces of bread and gobble it as an open-faced sandwich.

“Dude, check it out,” I giggled, my mouth full of bread and grilled pancreas. “It’s a
glandwich.”
I laughed until I choked, spat out the offending bit of bread, then popped it back in my mouth. It was too good to waste on dainty manners.

The bacon taste was so pronounced it was almost too concentrated, but the bread helped disperse the intensity of the flavor. As I devoured my pancreas, I felt exhilarated and gleeful. I was the Hannibal Lecter of the cow world!

I cleaned my plate and wished for more, mopping the pancreas juice up with the last piece of bread in the basket. The Greeks were right: Pancreas
was
all meat! It was so meaty it was like meat boiled down to its essentiality—pure meat-taste with all of the filler lifted away. It was like the Platonic idea of meat. It was Meat.

I was full, my lips were slicked with grease, and my belly felt bisected by the waistband of my pants. I wondered if the additional digestive enzymes I’d just ingested would make the metabolization of my meal that much swifter.

“Do you think cow enzymes work the same as human enzymes?” I asked my friend eagerly. “Do you think my shit will be noticeably different in anyway?”

My friend shrugged. His interest in Science seemed to wane periodically but my own never flagged. I made a mental note to call him with the results of my inquiry the next day

Mysteriously, our waiter never came back to our table. The busboy dropped our check.

I was more than satisfied with my meal. Sweetbreads: two thumbs up.

II.

I finally had a chance to try marrow at a fancy San Francisco restaurant during dinner with my editress and several other people from the company that publishes my books. It was listed as an appetizer, served “in the bone, with grilled bread.” I’d been curious about marrow ever since I’d read about its use as a savory sauce for beef in
Larousse Gastronomique
, so I ordered it excitedly, promising to share bites with the rest of the table.

The marrow arrived as promised—shockingly—in a sawed-off segment of femur standing upright on my plate. The bone was like a thick stem surrounded by daisy petals of charred bread. My plate came furnished with a long-handled meat coke-spoon small enough to reach deep into the interior of the bone.

I felt almost dazed with the savagery of it, like a caveman about to feast after a successful hunt. There was no hiding the fact that I was about to devour roasted blood cells from the middle of a mighty, once-living creature’s bone. I was the Antivegan, un-apologetically carnivorous, a devout meat-eater staking my claim and taking my Communion. I wanted to gnaw the bone, to grind my teeth on it, to lick and suck it, howling under a full moon. I wanted to smear the blood across my face.

Instead, I used the tiny spoon to scrape the cooked blood out of the bone primly, then spread it on a delicate morsel of bread.

I’d imagined marrow to be coarse and grainy, almost like a concentrated meat paste. Instead it was surprisingly gelatinous, with a slimy pull similar to the viscosity boiled okra lends to gumbo. My mouth wanted to reject it. It felt like someone else’s spitty tongue in my mouth—a sour alien blob that was only remotely meat-flavored, as if the person with the interloping tongue had just eaten a hamburger. I didn’t feel red-blooded and savage —I felt like I’d just popped out and swallowed my quarry’s raw eyeball by mistake.

My editress tried a spoonful. “Oh, it’s like meat-flavored snot,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

I tried another bite. This time the marrow reminded me of a mouthful of come—a giant, oysterish, frothy load. I swallowed it like a trouper. I’d always been good at that, never having developed a particularly sensitive gag reflex. Who knew that I’d use that X-rated talent in the middle of a fancy San Francisco restaurant? In front of my editress, my publisher, and various others? I’d thought my days of public sexual performance were over, but apparently the focus had simply moved from my pussy to my esophagus.

The problem really was the texture. The flavor wasn’t bad: It was subtly musky, oily, and animaly, but not meaty like muscle fiber. It was more intimate than that. It was clear to me that I was eating a part of a cow that most people never ate, a part that could only be harvested through a great deal of effort. I’d eaten brains in a French restaurant once, and the taste of the marrow was similar: It was the taste of a body’s secret spaces, the dignified parts not meant to nourish—the private areas reserved for the animal’s own use. Somehow, eating the marrow seemed, well, not
wrong
, but certainly not right. I’d eaten brains, I’d eaten sweetbreads, but I’d never delved that deep inside a once-living creature’s body before. I had gone, literally, to the bone of the matter.

As it cooled, the marrow began to smell like a wound, imperfectly cleaned. Was it actually
scabbing?
My stomach clenched lazily, like a greasy fist. I burped and tasted skeletal mass.

“How do you like it?” asked my editress. She’d sensibly ordered a beet salad, which looked delicious—cool and sweet in its lemony vinaigrette, like a pretty girl in a summer dress. “Is it what you’d thought it would be?”

“It tastes like an old, bloody tampon,” I said. The table went silent. My publicist pushed her plate away.

“Sorry” I muttered.

I would not order marrow again, at least not by itself or as a spread for toast. But in all fairness, I would try it in a traditionally prepared French sauce over beef, because I think the heat and the texture of the sauce might fix the aspects of the marrow I found so distressing. As part of a sauce, I think it would be easier to ignore the marrow’s grisly origins.

But I’m in no hurry to find out.

III.

Lord help me, I ate whale.

I know I’m going to hell for this. I know whales are endangered and that they’re smart and beautiful behemoths of the deep. When I was little, my mom used to play a record of whale songs to lull me to sleep. So I know that what I did was wrong. I ate part of a gentle, singing giant.

A year ago, I was in a restaurant in Reykjavík, Iceland, with my date (another American). Raw whale was on the menu as an appetizer. I decided to order it.

“Americans don’t like whale,” said our waiter. “Perhaps the lamb?”

I took that as a challenge. I wanted whale! It was my right to order whale if I wanted to—it was right there on the menu! I imagined whale flesh as cool and pink, shell-colored and vaguely salty. All of a sudden I was starving for clean, delicious whale.

“I want whale,” I said again. “Not lamb. I’m sure the lamb is good. But I want whale.”

“I’ll split it with you,” my date said.

We stared at our waiter defiantly. We were Americans, sure, but we weren’t
rubes
. We were from Seattle! He had no idea how much sushi we ate! The gauntlet had been thrown down.
Give us our whale!

“Very good,” he said, making a notation on his order pad. I felt a momentary pang of regret. I did love lamb—had I picked the right thing?

I could have lamb any day, though
, I thought. I was in Iceland. It was time to eat whale.

When the whale arrived, it was a small chunk of shimmering gray tissue on a bed of greens. The smell of lye was very strong. I’d expected something similar to sashimi—fresh, raw whale—but it was clear from the aroma of the cube of whale muscle on the plate that Icelanders preserve whale the way Scandinavians make lutefisk, by soaking the raw, tender flesh in caustic soda. The smell was like two rude fingers poked up my nostrils. I hadn’t known it would be like that—processed with what smelled like toilet cleaner.

My date looked ill, but game.

The waiter came back with two shots of schnapps. He explained that the kitchen had sent them to us gratis “to kill the taste.’ He stood back, assiduously wiping a clean table, in discreet observation of the crazy Americans who had ordered an expensive dish they would be too finicky to eat.

“You want to?” I said.

Despite the eye-watering chemical aroma, I was quietly exultant. Whale! It was s -wrong—morally, legally, and environmentally wrong—in a tantalizing spectrum of malfeasance that made my mouth water. Nothing could stop me from eating it—not the smell, not its greasy, gray appearance, not the schnapps from the kitchen sent to intimidate, not the waiter standing by and waiting for us to turn up our pampered noses at something that would cost him half a day’s pay. Not even a
Rainbow Warrior
full of Greenpeacers handing out flyers and trying to get our signatures on environmental petitions could stop me. I was in Iceland, and I was going to eat whale! I was a Viking—I came from the land of the ice and the snow!

I cut the chunk in half. The released lye fumes stung my eyes.

I glanced back at the kitchen.
I am your Overlord, bitches
.