A friend of ours needed help building a long fence line and as an incentive we were invited for a bar-b-que at the end of the project. The kids were with us for the summer, so one morning we loaded into the old Pinto and headed out. The job was easy to see: about half a mile of field fencing and too many posts to count. Ron had rented a post hole auger, the kind lovingly called a "man killer" and we got down to it. Hole after hole. The heavy auger digs down then with bent back two people haul it up out of the hole and move to the next spot. We worked for several hours when Ron's wife called us in for the treat: Bar-b-qued Mystery Meat. Interesting.
So we cleaned up and got down to the beer and grill. On went the meat, lean, thick and dark. And a couple of pigs ears for good measure. Yummm. Grilled Pigs Ears. Should have left right then.
When the meat was ready we sat down to the meal. Sliced like London Broil the meat was tender and fairly tasty. We couldn't guess what it was and there was no telling: these guys had at one time cooked and eaten an aborted goat fetus. Ron finally told the story. He was on a sampling trip to the coast and ran across a dead beached pilot whale. The eyes were still clear and the carcase didn't stink, so he sliced open the back and removed a large slab of meat.
So resolved the question of what kind of meat we had just had. On reflection, the ears were probably safer, but the whale was kind of tasty.
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3 comments:
GROSS! I COULD HAVE GONE ALL WEEK WITHOUT KNOWING THAT YOU HAVE EATEN WHALE AND PIG EARS!
I think it's closer to the truth to say that we were *fed* pig ears and whale. In hindsight, what disturbs me more is the source of the whale meat. I'm not advocating for the harvest of live whales in the wild, but this was from an hours-to-days dead *beached* whale. That's the oceanic equivalent of road kill.
(To be fair, I remember the whale as being tasty.)
But Gretchen remember that we did not know what it was until swallowed. This was road kill as Matt named it, and no one in their right mind would eat road kill. Ummm. See the new essay on "Eating Road Kill".
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