Under the Table (11 page)

W
hen I finally saw my doctor after my run-in with the cyclist, it turned out that I had a major concussion, a black eye, and three cracked ribs. Nothing could be done about any of these injuries, but Dr. Tay gave me a break on my bill, thank God. Michael was horrified that I was in such bad shape. He brought me a gigantic bouquet of peonies, my favorite flower. Their intoxicating scent filled our apartment and put a huge smile on my (slightly battered) face. He was being a real sweetie—leaving me little love notes by my coffee cup in the morning, making plans for a vacation getaway after school was over. He
was
being a bit secretive, having whispered phone calls to his friends, and suddenly declaring his sock drawer off-limits, but I was busy recovering from my accident and thought nothing of it. I had enough on my plate.

The concussion was making me nauseous, and I left class several times over the next few days to throw up. Taking a sick day was out of the question; since school was only six months long, the students were not allowed any absences, and missing even one day would put one too far behind in the curriculum. So I was not in the best shape for one of our last classes in Level 1: Organ Meat Day.

Even for someone who has no food prejudices, the words
Organ Meat Day
are a little disconcerting. Coming at the end of our first level, it seemed like the tough final of a Biology 101 class, designed to weed out the weak of heart and stomach. Students in the more advanced levels could be relied on to taunt us by telling stories of the truly unique smell and disturbing feel of the various organs we would be preparing, and partaking of, in this segment of the curriculum. I am not afraid of organs. When I lived in England, I read
Nose to Tail Eating,
the seminal organ meat cookbook by Fergus Henderson, with a sense of slavering anticipation. I love to make chicken liver crostini—the creamy richness of the liver plays up the dense, chewy texture of a good hunk of ciabatta. I had eaten tender, barely seared veal kidneys garnished with shaved black truffles in a brasserie in Nice. For a time in college, I had even been premed, and had fearlessly dissected my fetal pig, Sweetpea, before tucking into a BLT.

I was born in Virginia, a land where pickled pigs feet in gallon jars are available on the counter of many a gas station, right next to the cash register. I had also spent my very first years living on a farm, and had even eaten the occasional rabbit that lost a fight with the tractor. I think that experience of living closer to the land and to my dinner has made me more pragmatic than many of my peers. Chicken breasts come from chickens, not from Styrofoam trays in the grocery store. Even that gorgeous slab of perfectly marbled New York strip steak once came from a living, breathing animal, one with big brown eyes and impossibly long lashes.

I don't think it's wrong to eat meat, though I did go through a vegetarian phase (don't all high school girls?), but I have found myself becoming increasingly disgruntled with the American desire to divorce the act of eating meat from the animal it came from. I have been very lucky to be one of the few who were raised with an appreciation of the balance between people and animals. If we are going to raise animals and then eat them, then we should consume as much of the animal as possible—including the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. We should relish every aspect of the animal that has become our dinner. It is comforting that the French are a nation of eaters who preserve this tradition, of taking a delight in what the overhygienized Americans have deemed offal. They seem to be on a more intimate footing with their food—they love the living animal, love the filet mignon, love the
pieds et paquets
(lamb foot and intestine stew), love the
tête de veau
(calf 's head). But despite my attempts
to practice this overarching view of my role in the food chain, I still remember the shock I felt the day that I asked my mother where our bull calf Bosco had gone, and she had responded, quite matter-offactly, “The freezer.”

Fortified with the courage of these convictions, I refused to be swayed. I would relish every bite of every organ. Or so I thought. The Day of Organ Meat dawned, a fiercely hot, sticky morning in July, when the chewing gum on the sidewalks of SoHo was already hot enough to liquefy and cling to my shoes like sticky barnacles. SoHo in the summer becomes the province of movie crews and tourists, both of whose antics are enough to drive the hapless resident to the brink of insanity—if your block hasn't been shut down for filming and stepping foot outdoors doesn't bring shrieks of “You idiot! You walked through our shot!” from some production assistant, then you are unable to walk at all due to the herds of slow-moving roving tourists.

In class, it was my turn to help Assistant Chef Cyndee wheel the provisions for the day to the classroom. There, resting on the cart, was a calf 's liver that was as big as a pickup truck's engine block. The size of this baby was enough to make me wonder what sort of mutant factory-farm animal this had come out of. It was enormous. As the cart bumped its way down the hall, the dark red, shiny surface rippled slightly. And of course the visceral realities of the day's preparation didn't end there. There were also pale globes of thymus gland, laid out in their stainless steel tray as if fresh from some surgeon's operating room, and going by the ridiculous alias of “sweetbreads”—these, at least, were quiescent on our trip to the classroom. A bag of veal kidneys slumped dejectedly, like a drunk on a crosstown bus, at the bottom of the heap.

Organ meats are divided into two classes: the red and the white. Liver, tongue, and kidneys are red in hue, and so make up the
abats rouges,
the red organs. Brains, head, sweetbreads, feet, and marrow make up the
abats blancs,
the white organs. Organ meat comes
primarily from cows, usually calves; lambs; and, to a lesser extent, pigs. While the rising concern about BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) or “mad cow disease,” has not reached the fever pitch in the States that it has in Europe, the recent discovery that two cows did test positive for the disease has been enough to dissuade me from eating calf brains—so far. BSE is transmitted primarily through the brains and nervous systems of animals by proteins called prions. Until recently, animal feed was routinely made from the unwanted portions of slaughtered animals (everything from tails to eyeballs, including large portions of the central nervous system), a sort of Soylent Green technique that might cause widespread infection if one infected animal were to enter the food chain. While the FDA has ended this practice, I can still think of no better reason to eat grass-fed beef. Thankfully, our syllabus for Organ Meat Day spared us from the prospect of brains and a possible lawsuit for contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the unpleasant—and fatal—form “mad cow” takes in people. Indeed, our only experience with the
abats blancs
would be the sweetbreads. Most of our time in the kitchen would be spent preparing liver and kidneys, certainly enough gore for the faint of stomach.

Almost all organ meats must undergo elaborate preparation before they can be cooked. While practically every portion of meat must be trimmed to remove fat and connective tissue, to make them more aesthetically pleasing to the diner, most organ meats must first be peeled (like a banana). Organs are encased in a translucent, slightly shiny membrane that, I suppose, helps keep them together and functioning in the crowded morass of the abdomen. Thankfully, Chef Jean took on the task of peeling the huge hunk of liver, standing at the head of the classroom and gently peeling back the membrane before portioning the meat into pieces for each of us. Of all the chef-instructors, Chef Jean had the most deft and delicate touch with the knife, quickly and easily breaking down a carcass while he kept up a running commentary about what to do and what not to
do. I could easily imagine him as a surgeon, calmly cracking open a chest cavity while first-year residents gathered around to catch a glimpse of the gore within. But perhaps not all the students were so eager to catch a glimpse of Chef 's busy and bloody knife at work.

Marita, one of my fellow classmates, suddenly staggered back from her usual place right in front of Chef Jean. She looked decidedly green, a bizarre contrast to her deeply tanned complexion and thick braid of dark hair. With a mumbled excuse in her delectable Dominican accent, she fled from the room. When she returned, still a bit green around the gills, she explained that she was a very strict vegetarian, and while she was more than happy to prepare meat, the sight of all the flaccid organs lying before her had been a bit too much to take. I remembered my days of vegetarianism and thought Marita, a lifelong veggie, was very brave to take on the challenge of getting a culinary degree in the face of so much red meat.

Chef Jean, as usual, was unsympathetic. I am not even sure there is a word for vegetarian in French, so perhaps Marita's discomfort was lost in translation.

Each of us was given four slices of deep red liver with which to make…liver and onions. Of course, we used extra-rich demi-glace and slowly caramelized onions, and garnished it with fresh parsley, but ultimately, after almost an hour's effort, and with the classroom redolent of the metallic smell of iron-rich tissue being sautéed, I was struck with the realization that I had produced the exact same meal my mother had made, and I had refused to eat, hundreds of times in my young life. I was becoming my mother, as I passed the plate on to the students in the bread classroom across the hall, wheedling them to “just take a little bite. It's delicious!”

While twenty-four of us churned out twenty-four plates of liver that wouldn't be eaten, the sweetbreads were lurking. Many of the white organs have to be
dégorgés
(disgorged) before they can be used. Disgorging is the technique of soaking meat in cold water to flush out any lingering blood and juices. Usually organs must be
disgorged for anywhere from an hour to overnight. Sweetbreads must be disgorged, blanched, and then pressed under something heavy, so that excess water will be removed and the thymus gland becomes a more regular shape. Each team of two students was given one gland. My partner in crime, Tucker, and I began to work with ours, but as I was trimming the line of connective tissue that almost bisects the gland, the slimy thing suddenly shot off my cutting board and scored a direct hit on Tucker's clean chef 's jacket, leaving a disturbingly damp imprint. Luckily, my sloppiness went unnoticed by Chef, and the other students seemed to be having problems of their own. Still, we bravely continued. We browned it, and then braised it slowly in Madeira, white wine, and demi-glace. A final garnish of peas, turnips, pearl onions, and carrots added color to the brown sauce and off-white meat. In humans, the thymus gland is responsible for building the body's immune system. As I chewed a bite of the surprisingly soft flesh, whose flavor was a more delicate, nuanced riff on liver's single blaring note, I couldn't escape the thought that this was something that was meant to be “good for you,” a prophylaxis eaten in the hope of staving off some disease for which there was no cure.

So far, I had not been the fearless eater I had hoped to be on Organ Meat Day. I had envisioned myself gobbling down delicacies, urging my fellow students to overcome their finicky prejudices toward these overlooked treasures. It wasn't shaping up as I had imagined. In fact, it really wasn't going so well at all. It turns out I just don't like liver. One bite was enough for me to confirm this, and even the gentle nudging from Chef couldn't make me finish my braised sweetbreads. I was chagrined at the thought of being so provincial, of having a palate that was raised on roasts and steaks and yet was unable to appreciate the full-flavored, nuanced taste and texture of organs. This was a horrible revelation—how could I be a foodie if I couldn't appreciate these things? Even worse, as a chef, I certainly couldn't publicly extol the virtues of the fried gizzards on
my menu if I privately shuddered at the thought of actually eating them. I did have hope, though. We were scheduled to spend the afternoon working with kidneys, and kidneys I could definitely do. I like kidneys. No, I love kidneys—I had eaten kidney pie in England and seared kidneys in Nice. I had enjoyed kidneys in other countries—I couldn't be provincial! I was a kidney aficionada. I could still save face and be the offal-phile I so badly wanted to be.

Kidneys fall in the class of red organs and must be prepped before cooking. Veal kidneys are considered the crème de la crème of all types of kidney, and so that was what we were working with. Because their flavor is so delicate, and presumably because they come from animals that are so young they haven't really had time to
use
the organ all that much, veal kidneys require no disgorgement before use. They must merely be peeled and the fatty tissue removed before being sautéed, fried, or seared. But veal kidney isn't the smooth, red, bean-shaped organ that it is in humans. It looks more like a post-modern space station—small globular spheres held together by thick yellow ropes of fat. But I was not going to be deterred from my quest to prove my foodie chops and educate my palate. I carved off several spheres and trimmed them, splitting each one in half. Now they were more reassuringly like those morsels I had once slurped up with such self-assurance.

Sauteuses
were placed over high flames and oil began to shimmer in pans, ready to sear the kidneys to a crisp and seal in the juices. I was ready. My mouth was even watering slightly. Twenty-four budding chefs added kidneys to hot pans, and suddenly, horribly, the ammoniac reek of urine filled the air. Twenty-four noses wrinkled in unison, and with one voice, we shrieked “Gross!” The smell was vile. It was invasive, pervasive, and I could feel it bonding on a molecular level to my skin and hair. Chef Jean threw himself into the situation, which was quickly reaching the level of open mutiny.