Let's Talk: The Silence of the Goats

I had a different post planned for today, one about not stressing over the holidays. Maybe I'll get back to it. But something else happened. Something that affected me deeply. I want to share it with you.

Bruce and I went to a slaughter yesterday. A goat slaughter. Why the picture of a pig? I'll get to that.

It was a kosher slaughter--with a shochet, a butcher who slaughters animals in strict adherence to Jewish law.

What does that mean? Basically, the shochet and the animal must make personal contact at the moment of death. He slits its throat while looking the animal directly in the eye. If an animal were to blink or look away, the meat cannot be sold to observant Jews.

Of the ten goats killed, several looked away. And so were available for purchase--by goyim like me.

I don't want to get too graphic here. But here's what happened. Bruce and I walked down a muddy, rutted road to some rickety outbuildings. As we approached, there were seven bloody hides hanging off a fence. We rounded the corner just as they were sawing the head off one carcass.

The smell of death was thick. Overpowering. I threaded my way between two carcasses skewered on metal hooks and made my way back to the table where they were selling the meat.

I was scared going in. Scared I was going to be sick. Scared I'd be the goy puking at this ritual, religious slaughter.

Instead, I stood behind Bruce as he picked out the cuts from a chest freezer and tears began rolling down my cheeks. I hurt inside. I began to cry.

I didn't want to look away. I watched what they were doing to those animals on the hooks. I wanted to know. Not from some prurient interest. Not because of some stupid locavore BS. But because this is what it means to eat what I eat.

The people cutting up those goats hanging from the hooks were as gentle and as kind a people as I've ever seen. They were soft-spoken and peaceful. They kept patting the carcasses as they skinned them. Almost petting the animals. They talked about the goats. About how this one was so playful. But not in a snide, joking way. They were serious, almost reverent. Several times, I was told, they said a quick prayer, thanking God for the goat, for its life, as they patted it--before disemboweling it.

I won't go on. It was gruesome. Horrible. It's one thing to see it on TV. There's a distance, a gap between you and it. There's another thing to stand there, your shoes in the bloody hay, your head reeling.

And yet it was somehow also sacred. Yes, sacred. Not a word I would have thought. But that was also part of my tears. The whole scene was somehow very human, very religious. So I wanted to tell you about it.

So why the pig at the top of this post? Because that's our pig, Bruce's and mine. That's the pig we drove to slaughter. In fact, that pig is going to its death in that picture. Those are Bruce's boots on the fence rail. It's a story told in HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. I'll leave that story to the book. Believe it or not, it's an amazing story, if you haven't read it, both funny and redemptive.

For now, I'd like to leave me crying at a goat slaughter in a ramshackle barn amid muddy fields in very rural New England.

Because it's important. Did it make me a sudden vegetarian? No. Did it hurt? Yes.

Because taking a life hurts. And it should. We've lost that. And with it, some of the compassion I saw among those observant Jews, butchering the goats.

My experience affirmed some resolutions I've already made. You may already know these, but I'll repeat them here. I only eat meat if I can shake the hand of the person who raised the animal--and was involved in its slaughter. I only eat meat that I know comes from animals raised humanely--and killed humanely. I believe in that eye contact. Because it hurts. Because it should.

I'm not a fanatic. I cannot foist my ethics on my friends and family. If I'm invited to your house and you make a chicken from a big-box warehouse store, I'll eat it with gusto.

But in what I can control, I have found my ethical lines. Amid my tears.

Which means I'm eating a lot less meat these days. Which means I am actively involved in the process of life and death that leads to eating.

From those tears come understanding. As Emily Dickinson said of her own maturation: "A session wiser, and fainter, too, as Wiseness is." From those tears come compassion. From those tears come thanksgiving.

Pistachio Cardamom Cookies

Lately, I've been obsessed with cardamom, my new favorite "warm" spice (as in "warm in the body," like cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace--not hot, and not herbaceous).

I've been putting it in chocolate cake, in ice cream, in chicken sautés, in just about everything. I was reading some cookbooks this morning and found a recipe for sour cherry cardamom clafouti. I almost passed out.

Last week, probably to stifle my cardamom whining, Bruce morphed the Indian sweet, kaju makrum (cashew macaroons) into ridiculously crisp wafer cookies with pistachios and, yes, cardamom. I swear, all week I didn't eat any sweets during the day so I could have a small stack of these with a glass of milk after dinner, my little-kid dessert while the Olympics were on. I was undone. They're that good. Try them. Promise.

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Pizza with Prosciutto and Artichokes

It's the last of the weeks of our ham tour on this blog. All to celebrate the publication of the new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER--which is now officially out and, as they say, available at fine stores everywhere. Or skip the stores and go online. Get yours here. While it's hot!

Today, we've got a pizza with prosciutto, one of a couple pies in the book--but one of about 25 recipes in a larger chapter that deals with all the European dry-cured hams, from jamón ibérico to sunca, from presunto to jambon d'ardennes, speck to jambon de vendée.

In some ways, these hams represent the very origins of pig curing. They are undoubtedly the ancestors of American country hams, like Virginia hams (and the Kentucky ones I found in the trip narrated in the book). And for many foodies, they're the sine qua non, the (as Aquinas called such a thing) first and final element.

Ha! A reference to Aquinas on a food blog. And a direct tie between medieval scholasticism and ham. My work is done here. Except for the recipe for today.

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Cider-Cured, Braised Ham

Welcome to ham month on the blog. Don't worry: it won't be ham all the time. But all month, I'm going to be featuring snippets from our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. Up top on this page sits the ham for today: a cured, braised one. And there to the right on the page sits the book itself. It's already available on amazon--and will be published in just a few weeks.

I can't wait until you see it! It's the first time I've written a book in first-person. All our other books are written as "we." This one's "I." It's my fractured, at-times hilarious take on how Bruce developed those 100 recipes, plus the story of how we raised our own pig, took it to slaughter, tried to cure one leg, failed, tried again, and learned more about ham than you can imagine, including tres chic European hams and down-home American country hams.

To quote from the introduction:

From that first fateful day when we started this project [you'll have to read about it--let's just say it involves the lethal combo of Eudora Welty and porn], Bruce and I have endured refrigerators full of ham leftovers, with hunks of pork being delivered by UPS every afternoon; I've been to northern Kentucky in the dead of freeze-butt winter; both of us have been to a ramshackle slaughterhouse in rural Massachusetts; and we have borne witness to an enormous toe-on pig leg in our back refrigerator, a swarm of maggots in a French charcuterie, and a group of chic, black-bedecked New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in aspic.

So let's get our first sneak-peak recipe from the book: the way to make your own wet-cured ham.

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