Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Did He Who Made The Lamb Make Thee . . . Delicious?

Ohohoho! NYT has a great piece today about the growing popularity of goat meat.

If you want to drool, keep reading. No, really.
And if you want to be warned of the risk of incurring the wrath of God:
Zak Pelaccio, chef at 5 Ninth in the meatpacking district, stops by Ms. Hushour's stand for goat shoulder, which he braises in goat's milk that he also buys from her.

Watch out, Zak!

As God put in in Exodus 23:19: "Lo tivasheil gidee bakhalev eemo," or "Don't boil a kid in its mother's milk."
Seems the Canaanites (always bad luck to be an ethnic group ending in -ite; they all go extinct) used to do this to please the gods.
And no way was God saving the Jews from Egypt so they could move into Canaan and start worshipping idols again. So he put the kibosh on all emulating sorts of local religious practices, and fast.

Later, with the "fence around the Torah" concept, careful rabbis expanded this prohibition to forbid eating any meat (including birds, which shows that rabbis aren't real champs with the taxonomy) with any dairy product. Observant Jews have separate dishes for meals containing meat and those containing dairy products. They even wait an hour between eating dairy and meat.

Now, I'm pretty much don't keep kosher (you don't say "I'm kosher"-- that means its OK to eat you).
But I ent eating no kid boiled in goat's milk.
I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and I know it wasn't for nothing that God put specific prohibitions in the Bible against things like toying with the Ark of the Covenant, practicing witchcraft, and eating pigs.
Maybe you're not Jewish, or not very Jewish, but I mean-- this is pretty specific. Are you sure you want to mess with this?
Remember the melting eyeballs?
I'm not taking any chances.

On the other hand, goats in general are definitely okay.
Jews have been eating goats since before we got the Bible.
Hey, an angel even told Abraham to eat one instead of killing Isaac!

And there's nothing wrong with the Northern Chinese "young goat leg braised with soy sauce, ginger, star anise, cinnamon bark and rice wine." I know those guys don't put cheese in anything. And with that dish, I might actually believe them when they say it contains "no pork."

And an L.A.-style birria, "tortillas . . . stuffed with slowly roasted goat, chopped onion, cilantro and a hot red sauce from Jalisco in central Mexico"-- I think I'm in love.

Don't even get me started on "goat wrapped in avocado leaves, rubbed with chili, and steamed in beer." That's just foodie porn.

I don't care if I'm eating "the same breed that Heidi of the storybook tended for her grandfather in the Swiss Alps," or "Boer goat, first bred in the 1930's by South African farmers."

And I don't care if goats can help wean farmers off tobacco production, ease the transition of Somali refugees, remove weeds in place of pesticides, or that they'll "always be free range because they are climbers."

Because, Goat, He who made the lamb made thee . . . delicious.
Before
After

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dude, everyone knows the reason God forbade meat-and-dairy was that He was on a diet to try and impress Isis (or Osiris... the chick one), and He was going to be damned if the Israelites were going to be noshing on cheeseburgers that He couldn't join in on. God's a selfish prick sometimes. That's what it means when He says "I am a jealous God---put them M&Ms away and eat your gefilte fish."