The Poor Mouth

Heart & Soul: Argento’s Suspiria

[Note: This column first appeared on The Huffington Post.]

As a woefully unproductive waste of soft tissue, I spend a great deal of my time—most of it, really—eating unhealthy foods and watching appalling movies on Instant View. Last October, in hopes of fostering the illusion of productivity while leaving my habits unchanged, I wrote up a series of dinner-and-a-horror-movie pairings for my culinary blog, The Poor Mouth. My selections included The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and tacos lengua; The Exorcist (1973) and split pea soup; Let the Right One In (2008) and Swedish meatballs; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Red; Pumpkinhead (1988) and pumpkin seed mole; Dagon (2001) and stuffed squid; and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and chicken fried steak.

I owe this idea to my shoddy memory: I’d conflated TNT’s Joe Bob Briggs-hosted MonsterVision (1993–2000, R.I.P.) with TBS’s Dinner and a Movie, which first aired in 1995 and is not, alas, horror-centric. As a tribute to ol’ Joe Bob, whose western shirts and bolo ties loomed so large in my adolescent consciousness, I’ll reprise the feature this year for a larger audience than my Facebook friends, all of whom, to judge by their status updates, are preoccupied with child-wrangling and “wishing this cold would go away.” Check back for a new ill-advised date-night suggestion every Friday from today until Halloween!

And now, for our feature presentation: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). In brief, Suspiria is about a young woman, Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper), who has the misfortune to enroll in a dance academy run by a coven of witches. If this sounds to you like some new thousand-page bestseller for tweens, you’ve got a few surprises ahead of you, like Entertainment Weekly’s nomination for “the most vicious murder scene ever filmed.” I won’t even mention the broken window, the maggots, or the piano wire. For what it’s worth, Jessica Harper seems to have devoted her entire post-Suspiria career to thinking happy thoughts.

Despite several grisly scenes, Suspiria, which takes its name from Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis, is not schlock. Schlock rarely boasts so singular—albeit not quite beautiful—an aesthetic. The film is shot in such luridly saturated color that it looks like a stained glass window come to life; Argento has said of the film’s production that he was “trying to reproduce the color of Walt Disney’s Snow White; it has been said from the beginning that Technicolor lacked subdued shades, was without nuances—like cut-out cartoons.” Some of Suzy’s fellow dancers would look at home in a Klimt painting. 

Though the acting frequently leaves something to be desired, the film never plays its deficiencies, or its nightmarish absurdities, for laughs. You will search in vain for anything like comic relief in Suspiria: To quote from its promotional material, “The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.” These days, it’s not unusual to hear a hipster name-check Argento with the proprietary reverence once reserved for a Fellini or a Bergman. Nevertheless, on the assumption that most readers haven’t seen Suspiria a few dozen times, I’ll say no more about the plot. Just watch it—and then wash your eyeballs thoroughly with soap and warm water.

What’s for dinner? For the cocktail portion, I’m recommend something profondo rosso like a Manhattan or, better yet, a Bella Ruffina. (There’s also red wine, of course, but I guarantee you know more about that than I do.) For the entrée, with special thanks to the Colavita archive, here’s a treat that may be as unfamiliar as Suspiria: Beef Heart alla Soffritto. It’s difficult to find good beef heart recipes, and I pondered weak and weary over about twenty Italian cookbooks at my local library before deciding to settle on an Internet recipe. This dish, unlike other stuff I’ve prepared with beef heart, is anything but ghastly—a delicious, low-calorie, and inexpensive sauce to enjoy with the pasta of your choice. It’s also easy to make.

First, procure a cow’s heart. One should do the trick, unless you’re having a big horror-themed dinner party, in which case you ought to spring for something fancier than beef heart. Rinse the heart thoroughly. It looks pretty awful, with its stringy “membranes” and hard, white, waxy fat deposits, but remind yourself that at least it’s muscle and not organ meat. Simmer for one and a half to two hours. When the heart is tender, cut off every hint of white—this is health food, remember?—and anything else you wouldn’t want to put in your mouth. Cube the remainder. I like pieces about the size of the carrots in a frozen vegetable medley. Sauté a chopped onion and a minced garlic clove in olive oil. Add the pieces of heart, tomato paste (I recommend more than Colavita’s recommended six ounces), dried basil and oregano, and at least one cup of water. Simmer for a half hour. And, for God’s sake, eat this before you watch the movie, or you won’t want to eat it at all.

An Affair of the Heart

S I MENTIONED in this Huffington post, my local Shop-Rite boasts a bewildering assortment of offal. As I mentioned in that same post, I am growing wary, even weary, of the offal craze. This stuff isn’t inedible, and some of it is quite nice in its own way, but anyone with a schoolboy’s command of economics can tell you that if a meat goes for under a dollar a pound, there’s probably a reason for it. Even so, I’ve been making my way down the Organs I Haven’t Tried list. I swear when I get to the bottom of it I’ll switch to caviar and ortolan bunting.

This is a cow’s heart. I’ve been meaning to do something with a cow’s heart for weeks, and my associate John B— is always mentioning it as a candidate for pickling. I can’t imagine anything more ostentatiously revolting than a pickled cow’s heart, but it was apparently once so commonplace that Volume 47 (1908) of Good Housekeeping could inform its readers that “[p]ickled beef heart makes a delicious and inexpensive change in the ordinary menu. Its preparation is extremely simple, too. After the heart has been thoroughly boiled in water, pour spiced vinegar over it, and set away to cool. Later slice thin, and serve on a dish garnished with summer savory or parsley.”

Times have changed. A quick search of today’s Good Housekeeping website yields, for instance, a blog post about the perils of having a “good looking gyno.” This may be the only thing on earth more nauseating than pickled beef heart.

The heart shown above was pickled in a spiced vinegar of my own devising. Should you like to try it—and I’ll explain presently why this is a bad idea—the mixture is as follows: one tablespoon coriander seeds, one tablespoon mustard seeds, two broken cinnamon sticks, four bay leaves, a teaspoon of whole cloves, a teaspoon of dill seeds, two teaspoons of black peppercorns, and five cardamom pods. These should be boiled in apple cider vinegar for a good while—a half-hour, say—and then placed in a mason jar with the heart, which will have been boiled for about three hours.

Pickled beef heart is, I’m sad to say, overpowering and nasty. I had a just few bites of it before relegating it to the Rubbermaid. The heart itself is roughly the consistency of tongue meat, but the vinegar overpowers whatever native flavor that meat might have. The sludge of spices makes it worse, if anything. But I was persuaded not to give up on my heart when I stumbled upon a recipe for something called “Coney sauce,” evidently a popular topping for hot dogs in Flint, Michigan. This horrible recipe is what I worked with. It says to grind a half pound of beef heart and a half pound of beef kidney (see above, in all its lobe-y glory), and then to spice it with paprika and chili powder.

I did so. I substituted a mixture of cayenne, ancho, and cumin powder for plain “chili powder,” adding a bit of salt and pepper for good measure.

The result, after cooking in vegetable oil, is not a proper sauce, but I suspect that’s the recipe’s fault. There are a host of more complex recipes out there, and most pictures of “Coney sauce” look far more saucy than what I ended up with, but it did, incredibly, taste great. Here’s a hot dog with Coney sauce and chopped onions—pretty awesome, if I may say so.

Meat, when ground and spiced, is meat. What this exercise taught me is: I should make all my chili out of organ meat, because it costs next to nothing. So after my “Coney sauce” sat around for a few days, I decided to fold it into some proper chili and make a chili dog. To my large quantity of Coney sauce, I added some ground leftover chuck and additional heart strips, two jars of plain pasta sauce, two cans of black beans, an onion, and a ton of cayenne and ancho pepper. The result made for a chili dog so perfect that it would have been an insult to dress it with additional condiments. Behold!

 

Pigs, Romans, Countrymen

E MARTINMAS REVELERS received a piece of good news as our meal was winding down: Our associate Mr. Tobias Arianna, of Arianna-Braun Architects, had just taken Juror’s Favorite at the 2009 New York Canstruction® contest, an “international charity competition where architects, engineers, contractors and students they mentor, compete to design and build giant structures made entirely from full cans of food. . . . [A]ll of the food from the New York City competition will be donated to City Harvest.” Toby, the dude responsible for my recent impromptu trip to Wellfleet, MA, contributed, along with the other members of his outfit, “Feed the Bank,” a giant piggy bank made up of 3,024 cans: all Chicken of the Sea® salmon, plus a “coin” in the top—a big old tin of “some generic sugar cookies,” according to Toby. In honor of “Feed the Bank,” I have decided to blog a porcine kitchen failure that I had intended to leave unreported. I’m talking, unfortunately, about Chinese red-braised pig ears. When I get done with this, you will never have to think about trying pig ears. Ever.

If you live in an affluent area, you’re unlikely to find these pre-packaged in the meat section of your grocery store. But all pigs have them, so if you ask your butcher nicely, I’m sure he’ll be able to track a few of them down. I paid $2.27 for four of them, and they were worth every penny and not a penny more. In case you’ve never seen a pig up close, the ear is roughly the size of a human hand. It is one of the most human-looking things I’ve ever eaten, but I’m not going to, you know, cry about it.

On to the preparation, which is simple, pretty inexpensive, and correspondingly mediocre. I got it from Serious Eats. I have no idea why Chichi Wang’s ear looks so much redder-braised than mine—longer cooking time? Different soy sauce? The correct rice wine? Anyway, you’ll need star anise, half a cinnamon stick, a quarter-cup of Shaoxing rice wine (I used Ka-Me), three tablespoons of soy sauce, and two tablespoons of sugar. Parboil the ears—“to remove any scum and impurities,” she says. Oh, there’ll be “impurities.” It’ll look like Satan’s bathwater.

Put the parboiled ears in a pot. Cover them with water, add the other stuff, and bring the floppy, nasty mess to a rolling boil. Wang suggests simmering for two and a half hours, after which “[a] chopstick should easily pierce through the skin.” I thought my ears were done when they passed the chopstick test, but since my mixture never really “reduced into a syrupy mass,” I suspect my real problem was too little heat and too much water to start out with. I will not, however, be giving this a second chance. Even had the flavors been there, the texture is singularly unpleasant—chomping into this ugly flap of cartilage, you’ll feel just like Mike Tyson. Ancient Chinese secret: Stick to bacon.

The Silence of the Cows

VER SINCE I tried lengua tacos in the Mojave Desert, I’ve wanted to make some myself. Beef tongue is not, it turns out, very easy to procure. I approached the good folks at Olde Hudson Gourmet about it. They promised to contact their butcher and then never got back to me. I would have blown me off, too. Cooking offal seems to be some kind of hipster fad, like pickling, and who wants to enable a hipster fad? I am no slave to fashion, however: I’ve always had a weakness for stuff that’s gross as hell. That’s why I give you lengua tacos, at long last, as part of a series of food and horror movie pairings. Hallowe’en is well and truly here.

But what about liver, fava beans, and a nice blah blah blah? My goodness, you’d think Hannibal Lecter ate the same thing every day, like a five-year-old who throws a tantrum if he isn’t served X-Treme Dinosaur Shapez!® chicken tenders. Not so! Remember Dr. Frederick Chilton’s chilling tale of Nurse Tartare? “The doctors managed to reset her jaw more or less. Saved one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate her tongue.” Variety is the spice of life.

I’d noticed that most recipes for slow-cooked lengua call for three pounds of tongue. What I didn’t realize before I tracked this sucker down at a Shop-Rite in Norwalk, Connecticut, is that it’s not three pounds of tongue. It’s a straight-up three-pound tongue. After you cook it, it will look like a size 12 white Buck—with taste buds.

Here’s what you do with it. Cover it with water in a large pot. Bring the water to a rolling boil. With tongs, remove tongue. Place tongue in a slow cooker with two halved onions, three or four halved garlic cloves, three bay leaves, a bunch of salt, and enough water or proprietary water / beer / cider vinegar blend to cover the works. Then cook it forever. The longer, the better. Many recipes advise three or four hours; this is sheer nonsense. With apologies to Withnail & I, this tongue was still a gray-yellow sock after three hours. Give it at least seven, on high.

Good things come to those who wait. When you think your tongue is ready to skin and eat, start browning a corn tortilla in a cast-iron skillet with a little vegetable oil and salt. Dice the inner meat (after removing the white “leather,” which will not, pace some recipes, “peel” or “slip” off) and sprinkle the chunks with salt. Serve with chopped onions, cilantro, and the hot sauce or salsa of your choice. Brave reader, you will tell me if ever the cows stop mooing? Promise?