BARBACOA DE VENADO FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE MITTEN

By Juan Montoya
I'd be lying if I was to say that I'm a big fan of barbacoa de cabeza.
Each Sunday you can see the lines forming at the well-known places all over town that specialize in this typical Sunday fare. Entire families crowd around the doors of these establishments to purchase a few pounds of the steamed beef-head meat. They either drive through the places or emerge from the stores and restaurants with brown paper bags spotted dark with the grease from this delicacy.
Add in a few dozen corn tortillas, salsa, cilantro and diced onions, and presto! you have the traditional South Texas Sunday barbacoa.
As I said, I'm no fan. Oh, yeah, I will partake of a taquito or two, but just looking at the grease coagulating on the wax paper makes my heart hurt.
However, as the saying goes, distance makes the heart grow fonder.
I was in the middle of the Michigan peninsula (the Middle of the Mitten) in the mid-1980s working for a Saginaw paper and living near Mt. Pleasant about an hour and a half away. In those days the Mexican food craze hadn't reached out in to the Michigama hinterlands. If you wanted fresh menudo or even barbacoa, you just about had to cook it yourself. That opportunity presented itself one night when my late father-in-law and my cuñados – all of them Chippewa Tribe members – went out hunting for a deer on their 80 allotted acres. Unlike many Natives, they hadn't clear-cut all their property so the Bureau of Indian Affairs could not rent them to local farmers for a song and instead kept them in their natural state of tall pine and thick underbrush. It was an ideal habitat for animals, not few of which were entire herds  of white-tail deer.
Natives are allowed to hunt on their allotted property without restrictions year-round, a throwback to the old treaties that allowed them to hunt for subsistence any time of the year.
About an hour or so after they left they returned with a large doe. They set about to skin it and hung it from its hind legs to a nearby tree as they set about to butcher it. I was watching them as they did it and after they cut off the head, I asked them what they were going to do with it.
"We'll give it to the dogs," they answered and were about to heave it nearby when I asked them if I could have it.
"What for," they asked.
"I'm going to make barbacoa out of it," I said to their startled looks.
Since it was the dead of winter the ground was frozen hard and there was no way that I could even get a spade into the ground, I skinned the head of hide and hair and wrapped it in thick aluminum foil. I made a small hole at the top an prepared some spiced which I mixed in water and poured it into the opening. I then set the oven at 350 degrees and forgot about it for the rest of the night.
My late mother-in-law had heard about me asking for the doe's head and had wandered over to see what her crazy Mexican son-in-law was going to do with the doe's head. When she came in the door, she was met by the glazed-eye gaze of the doe head resting on the oven's open door, it's tongue hanging out of one side of its mouth.
"Geez, Faithy," she asked her daughter genuinely frightened. "What is that?"
In the morning the household woke up to the fragrance of freshly-made barbacoa. The thin bones of the doe's head literally slid off the tender, succulent flesh. Since the doe was a woodland animal and ate the foliage of the Michigan forest, there was little, if any, fat at all on the carcass.
The smell wafted through the nearby homes and it wasn't long before my in-laws and cuñados were crowding int eh door to investigate. My ex had learned how to make flour tortillas by hand under the tutelage on my mom in Brownsville and a fresh batch was coming off the comal. I had cooked up a green salsa and the plates were ready.
When my mother-in-law entered the door attracted by the smell, I pulled up the chair of honor and placed a fresh flour tortilla with barbacoa before her.
"In honor of your place of respect for our elders we saved the eyes for you," I told her.
It was a while before we could convince her that I had only been kidding.