His skeptical hunter friends turned up their noses at the thought of eating the meat, but watched as he wrapped it in aluminum foil and then in a wet burlap bag and tossed it under the coals of a fire. After a few hours, the head was unwrapped and the hunters were surprised at how good the barbacoa de cabeza de venison was.
Now, 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 (like Vera's and Marcelo's on Southmost). 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 newspaper and living near Mt. Pleasant, about an hour and a half away.
In those days the Mexican food craze hadn't reached out into 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 Tribal 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. Those deer are not the pygmies we know in South Texas. They stand shoulder high or taller than man. They set about to skin it and hung it from its hind legs to a nearby tree as they butchered 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.
"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 and prepared some spices 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 wafer-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 in the 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 griddle. 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 and out of 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.
3 comments:
Can you say, chronic wasting disease? It's like mad cow disease, but in deer.
In the Caribbean they eat sheep tongue
Oh, no! They killed Bambi.
Post a Comment