The Namesake

I think about food at least as much as I think about anything -- hence, "the good life" in the subtitle.

This weekend the wife and took a train to NYC to see a friend on Broadway. For dinner we stumbled wide-eyed into a humid, bustling Cuban cafe. Well, it was just off of Broadway, so it wasn't exactly the hole in the wall, but nonetheless, it was decked out with banana leaves, sour orange marinades, and large, electric, slowly-moving (too slowly to count) palm frond fans. It was here that I was finally able to taste two of the greatest meats in the world, suckling pig and oxtail.

In Russia and Europe suckling pig (a pig who is young enough to suck) is slow roasted whole, usually with minimal seasoning and sauce -- white wine, olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, etc. Unfortunately, this suckling pig was not whole roasted. But lest some Cuban think that he can pull a fast one by me, I confidently scrutinized the pork that I tasted, which was obviously a young one. This pig was marinated then roasted. The marinade is traditional Cuban ingredients, especially sour orange juice, thyme, and allspice. Suffice to say that piglet (don't think Winnie) has a natural delicate saltiness that would wreck any vegetarian.

The Oxtail may have surpassed the suckling pig. It's the tail of a steer, not an ox, and it is sectioned off just you would think -- block sized cut sections of a tail, with a bone in the center and meat around it. What makes oxtail so trippy is that the meat looks like clear gelatin around the bone. When it cooks, it turns brown like meat, and it strips off like shredded beef, but it maintains a gelatinous texture. Oxtail is cooked tons of different ways, in soups, stews, roasted, barbecued, or whatever. This time it was braised in a sweet and sour sauce, also making use of the famous Cuban-Jamaican sour orange juice.

Suckling pig is hard to find, but oxtail is common enough at the market.