The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [136]
After an hour, when the chicken and pigeon were tender, Lourdes and Alicia added the two sprigs of rosemary, some powdered saffron, and a little salt, mixed them around, and removed about two cups of the dark broth, so that the remaining liquid came just to the handle rivets on the inside walls of the paella. All paellas are manufactured so that the rivets tell you how much broth to use for cooking the rice, which will soon resemble nothing more than a crusty, russet risotto. Vine cuttings were added to enrage the fire, and a kilogram of rice sprinkled evenly over the surface of the broth. After ten minutes of vigorous cooking the fire was damped, and the simmering continued for another ten minutes until the rice was just al dente. All the while, reserved broth was added in small doses as the rice swelled.
All of us were ravenous, but Lourdes let the deep reddish-brown paella stand for five minutes as the grains of rice absorbed more flavor and loosened from one another. Our conversation, which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was browned and crusty; the meat was tender and deeply flavored. Everything was imbued with the smoke of vines and fruitwood and the aroma of rosemary, and the Phaseoli lunati were, well, incomparable.
Max Lake, an Australian doctor turned wine maker, broke out a case of his best Australian red, and when no more than half of it had been drunk, one of the British writers among us revealed that, at the age of sixteen on a vacation in the south of Spain, she had been courted by El Cordobés, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.
November 1988
Going Whole Hog
Raymond’s taxi clattered through the humid night, carrying me from the Memphis International Airport to the East Memphis Hilton.
“I am a firm believer that the sauce and the slaw have a great bearing on the matter,” Raymond was saying.
“Granted,” I replied, “but a mere sauce or garnish can never alter the greatness, or lack thereof, of a slab of ribs.” I had discovered in only a few deft questions that Raymond was a Memphis native and an expert in eating barbecue; the topic for our half-hour ride was set. Raymond nodded. Momentarily we were in complete agreement about barbecue.
Whenever I travel to the South, the first thing I do is visit the best barbecue place between the airport and my hotel. An hour or two later I visit the best barbecue place between my hotel and dinner. In Memphis, making these choices is not easy. The metropolitan Memphis yellow pages list sixty-one barbecue restaurants; in truth, there are probably more than two hundred.
The clock struck nine-thirty as Raymond exited from the expressway and headed down Poplar. Time was running out. If I acted fast, I could cover two restaurants before closing time. But which to choose?
I had not come to Memphis merely to engage in some shabby and dissolute eating binge. This year, no doubt in recompense for a noble deed I had committed in a former life, I was invited to be a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest! When the call from Memphis came, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. But even before my plane landed, the awful responsibility began to press painfully upon my brain. Memphis is the pork-barbecue capital of the world, and the Memphis barbecue cooking contest is the preeminent barbecue event in the known universe. The 1990 Guinness Book of World Records deems it the largest. But when lovers of barbecue call the Memphis contest simply the Big One, they are referring to its moral and aesthetic authority as much as to its size. Would I be up to the job?
I decided to stifle these solemn thoughts until the next morning, or at least until after I had eaten a couple