There is no particular reason why meat needs to be associated with excess, but it is. I once ate turducken, which is a chicken stuffed in a duck inside a turkey, and found that it did little to assuage the turkey’s general awfulness, but why stop with a turducken? I read somewhere about a butcher who sells a fowl de cochon, which is a turducken stuffed in a pig, and another that sells what they call Pandora’s Cushion – a boned goose stuffed with a boned chicken, which was stuffed with a boned pheasant, itself stuffed with a boned quail. In India, we take the same basic idea – in this case, a goat stuffed with chicken stuffed with quails stuffed with eggs – and add it to a biryani. Why not?
The same goes for gigantism, especially in America. Restaurants parade their 64 oz steak, their pounds of pork ribs, their mile-high sliced steak sandwiches, their overdressed burgers, so massive that only a crocodile could get all the layers into its mouth in one bite. Have you ever heard of a cucumber sandwich measured in feet?
And technology. The professional grade smoker for your backyard that holds four turkeys, the human-sized tandoor (which reminds me that there is a man now free to walk around in Delhi, who became famous for broiling his wife in one of those), the grill with the black and silver aesthetics (and dimensions) of a small pickup truck.
All these, I am afraid, spell male. For whatever reason, meat cooking and especially meat cooking outdoors, is where men step into this otherwise mostly feminine space. As a young boy I remember going for picnics outside Kolkata armed with a portable stove and bolstered by persistent rumours that Uncle X was going to cook the meat.
Once we were there, the helper brought along for this purpose would squat on the ground, poking at the fire and adding fuel till it got going; the women of the family would cut vast amounts of onions, grind garlic and ginger and watch in awe while Uncle X strode the world like a colossus, examining what was happening at every work station, generous with his criticism, sparing with praise. Finally, the pot would go on the fire, the alliums would be mastered, the meat browned, the liquids added.
Uncle X would provide a running commentary, interspersed by impromptu critiques of the quality of the meat (which is why it always took so long to cook). In the meantime, the women prepared the khichuri, the chutneys, the fritters and a few vegetable dishes. Everything smelled wonderful, our stomachs growled, but the meat was never ready when it should have been.
We would finally get the green signal at about 3 pm, by which time some of the younger kids would have gone to sleep. I, always the greediest, would, however, be first in line to get an early helping. The meat was always a bit dry, but I didn’t care, the gravy was what I really craved. The amalgamation of the spices and alliums with the fat leached from the meat created a veritable ambrosia, which I would eagerly mop up with the rice.
There. I put my cards on the table. I like meat mostly for the delicious fat it comes with. To me, the current fashion of eating leaner meats, but still in large quantities, is a mistake (in the US, meat-eating continues to go up, but it’s more chicken now). I recognise the importance of relying less on methane-producing quadrupeds to keep the world from overheating, but there is still the wanton cruelty of the way most animals are reared and the general dreadfulness of large-scale meat-packing plants, now exposed for their role in spreading Covid-19.
If you, like me, still want to hold on to meat, why not go for what I would call the Wagyu compromise? Eat less meat, but meat of a higher quality, meat that is produced with kindness and consideration, like Wagyu meat is supposed to be. More small portions of acorn-fed pata negra, less overcooked, hormone-swollen chicken breast with the texture of newsprint. It is true that both Wagyu and pata negra are exorbitantly expensive and out of most people’s reach (including mine) except on very special occasions, but they also offer an intensity that makes the small quantities that we can afford extremely satisfying.
The principle extends – better to buy the best quality available (organic meats, free-range chicken). Adopt the tricks used by cooks in billions of poor families to make a little bit of meat go further – meat cooked with vegetables to make the taste linger, beautiful salads where the meat is the impresario, dishes where the sauce is the king.
One of the maxims of economics is supposed to be “de gustibus non est disputandum” – we don’t argue with tastes. People know what they want, don’t tell them what to like. This is clearly what I am violating here, asking my readers to think differently about the way they eat meat, but then I have never been convinced that this particular principle makes much sense.
A recent experiment in Switzerland highlights the highly contingent nature of our preferences. The experimenters asked a set of bankers to go into a closed room, toss a coin ten times and report the result. They would be paid SFR 20 (about $20) for every extra head. No one else observed the tosses, so in principle they could lie as much as they wanted. However, just before they went into the room, a randomly chosen half was reminded of their profession as bankers, whereas for the rest, it was their status as citizens and human beings that got highlighted.
The difference in their behaviours is striking. The “citizens” told the truth; the reported number of heads was close to 50 per cent. The “bankers” lied systematically. They had 16 per cent too many. Perhaps being reminded that they are bankers made them want to conform to the stereotype for rapacity, or maybe it is the other way around, maybe thinking of themselves as citizens brought out their better selves.
I suspect there are also many men who feel obligated to reach for the 64 oz rib steak because they have been told that “real men don’t eat quiche”, but would be perfectly content to pass otherwise. Perhaps they just need some good recipes, some way of continuing to be the meat cook of the family, but one armed with a pressure cooker rather than a smoker or a monster grill. Or at least I hope so.
Chicken cooked like a vegetable
Here is another dish where the meat is almost the excuse for gorging on the sauce, which goes very well with white or brown rice (and I suspect with orzo, fregola sarda, couscous or other small pasta). I made this one up to make chicken palatable to my wife, who is very much a red meat person, and it is closer in style to a South Indian vegetable dish (you could make it with cauliflower as well) than to the conventional ways of cooking meat. Fashioning vegetarian dishes that imitate meat recipes is very much in vogue these days – this, if you like, is going the other way, but with the same goal of limiting our reliance on meat.
Ingredients
1 /2 kg boneless chicken thighs (Cut the thighs into 3 strips in the direction where the bone would have been, and then if the thighs are large – say, 4 thighs in 1 /2 kg – cut the strips into halves, now cutting across the length.)
½ tsp turmeric 1 tsp salt
4 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp black mustard seeds
1 sprig curry leaves
2 red chillies
2 tsp urad dal
A pinch of thing
2/3 shallots, cut into slices the thickness of a matchstick, about 2 /3 cup
1” x 1 /4” cinnamon stick
2 cardamom pods
¼ tsp peppercorns
2 juicy and ripe smallish tomatoes, chopped as small you can (2 /3 cup)
2/3” cube of ginger, chopped into strips the size of half a regular matchstick; it should fill 2 tbsp
Salt, to taste
Recipe
Marinate the chicken in salt and turmeric for 20 minutes.
Heat oil at medium high, and when you see waves, throw in the mustard seeds. When the popping slows, add the chillies, curry leaves, hing and urad dal, and after 40 seconds, the shallots. Fry for 2 minutes at medium low to let the shallots soften.
Then raise the heat to medium high, wait a minute and add the cinnamon, cardamom and peppercorns into the oil. Stir once or twice and add the chicken, stirring and frying.
After 3 minutes, add the tomatoes and ginger and fry for another 5 minutes or so, by which time the chicken should be perfectly done.
Take out a piece and stick a knife into it to see if there is any blood leaching out (in which case keep frying). Taste for salt.
Excerpted with permission from Cooking To Save Your Life, Abhijit Banerjee, illustrated by Cheyenne Olivier, Juggernaut.
