The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [115]
“It does say it’s supposed to be good for hangovers,” Keith observed, scrolling down.
“My wife and I always pick out the hominy and eat it all instead of the tripe. I just can’t stand the texture ... it’s so gristly and weird.”
Melissa made a face. “I’ve never had it before.”
“I don’t think I could eat tripe, either,” said Keith.
“Sara’s grandmother always makes it with much more hominy these days than tripe,” said Mike D. Our conversation was interrupted when he had to take a phone call.
A few minutes later, I sent an instant message to Mike D.
“Does the tripe in it look like this?” I copied and pasted a link to a photo of whitish, prickly-surfaced rumen tripe in a bowl with a thin, clear sauce.
“No,” he typed. “That actually looks more appetizing than the kind she makes it with.”
I brought up another image of braised honeycomb tripe with turnips, another Chinese dim sum specialty. The honeycomb tripe had much larger welts on its surface, hence its namesake, and a floppier, softer texture.
“Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” he wrote back.
I asked Mike if he might be able to get his grandmother-in-law’s recipe for me so that I could make it myself. I joked that I’d have to plan on getting really wasted the night before and then try it out.
“Sure,” he wrote. “But I can’t vouch for its healing powers since I never eat the actual tripe.”
By the end of the day, he’d sent me a Word document with the simple recipe, passed on from his wife. (On days when the server was down for hours, things moved very slowly.)
“Sara’s Super-Secret Menudo,” the recipe was titled. I looked it over. It seemed awfully easy to prepare. I printed it out and began thinking of how and to whom I was going to serve up this rare treat.
I would throw a brunch, of course. And I’d invite a few gung-ho friends to spend the night before getting soused with.
My friend Aaron immediately came to mind as someone to bring into this experiment. Aaron and I had gone to college together, and over a semester in Europe we had both seen what the other was capable of eating—which was pretty limitless. We had also traveled to Thailand with two other friends, on a separate trip after graduation. On the streets of Bangkok, Aaron had eaten a scorpion from a vendor. Its spiky exoskeleton looked like it had been baked (or simply dried, perhaps?) to a polished mahogany, and just before handing it over to him, the girl attending the cart sprayed it with some kind of sauce from a plastic spray bottle. As Aaron held the scorpion to his mouth, a few other Westerners passing by stopped to gawk at him and got to witness the earth-shattering crunch when he popped it into his mouth whole and bit down.
“Oh, my god!” a girl had shrieked in a British accent. As if hypnotized, the bystanders stood there a minute longer, twisting their faces in horror as Aaron chewed noisily.
“Tastes like burned chicken,” he declared.
By now Aaron was married; he had met his wife, Mai, during the two years he spent teaching English in Japan. Jordan and I had gone to Cincinnati for their casual weekend-long wedding about a year ago. Now he and Mai were living in New York, but we rarely found the time to hang out due to our different schedules; Aaron was in his first year of law school. We still found time to catch up on the phone and by e-mail, though, and I fired off a rambling e-mail to him explaining my menudo mission.
Aaron replied immediately with enthusiasm.
“That is perhaps the greatest idea I have heard in a long time,” he wrote. “I am totally intrigued by this ancient Mexican hangover cure. We should get completely wasted, and I’m thinking maybe a sleepover should be in store, just so it won’t be so much trouble for us to get to someone else’s place the next day.”
He even went so far as to say that he and Mai were experts at bunking on people’s floors. I wasn’t sure this was necessary but was excited that my idea had garnered solid interest. I requested Jordan’s attendance next. It was no surprise to me, after the