Gut Feeling
by Juan Francisco Moretti
illustrations by Milagros Brascó
One hundred and eighty years ago, Esteban Echeverria wrote the first Argentine short story. The Slaughter Yard centers around a small, nameless city in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where days of biblical rains cut off shipments of cattle and the people quickly run out of red meat to eat. The people go wild; the prices of chicken and fish rise astronomically and the government has no choice but to intervene and send live cattle to calm the town after two weeks without beef.
Echeverria’s story is an allegory for the times. He saw his young, newly independent country plagued with savagery. A nation divided. The butchering of animals is routine violence and revulsion and the townspeople cheering it on are painted as brutal, insensitive and depraved Federalists. Echeverria was an opposing Unitarian aligned with a more European political ideology and is represented by a noble, sophisticated man who arrives in the town by mistake and is tortured and humiliated in the same slaughter yard.
Both political parties disappeared in the 19th century yet their ideologies and prejudices continue to resonate in today’s political discourse, their fundamental differences never fully resolved. That dualism is a part of everything. The grotesque is never seen as something separate from the joy of the people; the crossover shows up in the most mundane of traditions.
Today, no matter where you are in this enormous country, no matter the time of year, walking down the street on a Sunday afternoon means being surrounded by asado. Towers of smoke spiral into the air, the smell of coal or wood fires is everywhere and the sounds of laughter and music flow out of patios, gardens and terraces. With luck, you are headed towards one of these fires.
In culinary terms, an asado menu has one primordial ingredient: beef. There might be charcuterie, salads, sides and desserts but they are mostly optional. The essence is the meat. Flank steak, short ribs and tenderloin are standard although you might find cuts of pork and chicken too. Never absent are the chorizos, which are eaten like a sandwich and called 'choripan', often accompanied with morcilla, similar to black pudding, and offal meats.
Everything is cooked on top of one parrilla under the watchful eye of the asador, who works the fire and must always have a glass of wine or fernet with Coca-Cola in hand. The cooking times are long. As each piece of meat is ready to eat, it is transferred to a wooden cutting board where it is sliced and divided amongst everyone at the table. At some point during the meal, custom demands that a guest screams: a round of applause for the asador. The room erupts with clapping and the sound of applause reaches the neighboring patios and gardens where the same scene is likely playing out.
The asado is one of the few traditions that unites Argentines, as divided as we are in our opinions and convictions. Few things erase differences like the combination of a grill, a bag of coal and ten bottles of red wine. Like many residents of this thick metropolis, I grew up in an apartment without a patio, garden or balcony, which is to say, without a grill to host asados. Replicating the meal on a cast iron or in the oven can be tasty but it will never be same as the experience of being invited to a barbecue: the flavor of smoke and the delicate crust that forms around a steak can’t be accomplished in a kitchen. And the achuras, or offal meats, are only good on a grill: kidneys, sweetbreads and intestines. The intestines, above all else, have always been my favorite.
Last year I moved to a slightly larger apartment. With a little bit of work, I was able to fit a portable grill that my in-laws gave to me onto the balcony. Immediately I felt like it was my moment to become a respectable asador; I would never have to wait on an invitation when I was in the mood for a plate of visceras.
To put it plainly: visceras are guts. In Spanish, 'achura' originates from the Quechuan word achuray, which means ‘to share’, an unusually friendly name to peg to the image of a pile of guts on a grill. Or maybe not. We have always been friendly with blood and gore. From the fight between Unitarians and Federalists to arguments between today’s Radicals and Peronists, we are used to dividing ourselves, getting angry, arguing with one another and coming back together again. It makes sense that our asados replicate what we do to ourselves.
‘Chinchulines’ also comes from the Quechuan language; the word ch'únchull which more literally means ‘intestines’. That’s exactly what they are: thin strands of beef or lamb intestines cooked over a fire. There are different ways to cooking chinchulines but the shared goal is an extra crispy bite, a generous slab of fat and a creamy center with a shadow of fresh grass. They should always be eaten as soon as they are pulled off the grill; when they cool, the fat hardens and flavor flattens.
For most of my life, eating chinchulines was infrequent. I had to be invited to an asado where the asador had chosen to include offal and had enough experience to cook them well. A question of luck. The portable grill was my opportunity for a rematch.
The asador is a solitary figure who guards the fire while everyone else is having fun. Their role is a mixture of provider and loving nurse, attentive to how each person likes their meat cooked or if someone prefers their sausage sliced up the middle and seared. The asador is a romanticized and virile character within the pantheon of local machismo, and just as a good asador is deserving of praise, a bad asador will be eternally ridiculed.
The Argentine male is born with a natural ability to light and control fire, or at least that is what we tell ourselves with our chests pushed to the sky. Maybe we are born with the ability to believe that we know how to do things that no one has ever taught us. As a means of precaution, I didn’t invite anyone to my first attempt at barbecuing chinchulines and waited until my girlfriend had made plans to eat out with her friends. An asado for one is practically an oxymoron but I didn’t want to put my honor at risk. It was a good choice because the asado was a total disaster.
I committed a beginner error: I started to drink fernet before I lit the fire and when the coals were red, I was more concentrated on dancing cuarteto. I sang at the top of my lungs on my balcony and threw the chinchulines directly from the sink to the grill. They immediately stuck to the metal and dripped into the fire and over the coals. Unlike a traditional parrilla built into the wall, the portable barbecue doesn’t allow you to move the coals. I did my best to move the chinchulines, wrestling them from the grill and flipping them over but after agonizing over the flame the fire went out. Asadus interruptus.
When my girlfriend got back home, she found me eating frozen empanadas while the sound of a melancholic cuarteto played in the background. Luckily, I hadn’t tried to cook a regular cut of beef; my error would have been much more expensive.
Beef isn’t cheap in Argentina. That might sound strange for a country that produces 3 million tons of beef a year. It’s a traditional industry in our country, like football, and just like our footballers, the best local resources are usually exported. For beef producers, the international market is much more appealing than the internal market. China and Europe pay with stable currencies. The Argentine peso, to the contrary, is constantly devalued. China buys shanks, Europe asks for steaks, Israel takes rounds, and all the while the local market balloons and grows more and more expensive.
Despite inflation, the daily diet for many Argentines consists of meat with something. We are amongst the largest consumers of meat. Every year we eat an average of 100 kilos per capita. When beef is too expensive, people eat chicken or pork chops. But there is one thing that more powerful countries don’t buy from us that we can still share with each other: the visceras.
The chinchulin is cooked throughout Latin America, like in Mexico with the popular taco de tripa. If you travel across the continent, you will find that few replicate the Argentine style. In most countries, chinchulines are boiled beforehand to both tenderize the meat and speed up the cooking process. This is the method of choice in Buenos Aires restaurants but on home grills, they are thrown on the parrilla raw. Unlike in other countries, everything is used: they aren’t cleaned out and the fat is rarely carved down.
“I think that boiling them beforehand is a sin,” says Laucha Luchetti, the host and grill master of Locos por el asado (which translates to Crazy for grilling), a Youtube channel with more than two million followers. “They lose a lot of flavor. The best way is the most traditional: cutting them into curls that look like ears without cutting off any of the fat. You don’t move them at all. Twenty or twenty-five minutes on one side, fifteen on the other and no salt until it’s totally cooked. Some salt and pepper and juice from a lemon that you heat on the grill so that the juice is warm.”
Cleaning and boiling the chinchulin gets rid of their ‘filling’ which is whatever is left inside the intestine. All of the delicate perfectionism that is dedicated to preparing the chinchulin is so that the viscera holds on to its partially digested grass, the terroir, which you can taste with each bite. Or as Laucha says, “the shit is the best part, the pre-shit.” And that’s what it is, no euphemisms or metaphors, we’re eating shit. That’s the tradition.
This must be one of the few cases where the tradition tastes better than the sin but I am ready to defend my sins because this is an inalienable talent of Argentine-ness. When it comes to eating meat and talking too much, we have a long and rich history.
For my second try, I decided to try a more sophisticated technique. I carved off some fat and straightened them out in a large pot. With care, uncertainty and disgust, I stuck my hand into the mountain of white, sluggish guts and began to twist them into a long french braid until it was transformed into something that looked like a thick rope or challah bread or a monstrous prolapse depending on your imagination. The chinchulin cooked through and the flavor was good, but the cooking wasn’t uniform. It split apart and the spots where I tied the knots together were chewy. Partial credit.
In The Slaughter Yard, the government finally sends fifty cows to the hungry town and everyone gathers to watch the butchering. They celebrate and fawn over the butchers and smile with glee. They also fight one another.
“In another spot two young boys practicing the handling of their knives, slated at one another with terrifying thrusts, while farther on, four lads, ‘much more mature than the former, were fighting over some offal which they had filched from a butcher. Not far from some stray dogs, lean from forced abstinence, struggled for a piece of kidney all covered with mud. All a representation in miniature of the savage ways in which individual and social conflicts are thrashed out in our country.”
Although there is enough meat to go around, the rations aren’t enough to satiate the crowd's hunger. They climb over each other to steal the leftover fat and visceras. Their violence never diminishes their joy.
Echeverria places his story during Lent, when eating meat was a sin, to accentuate the barbarism of the scene. Today, hardly any congregations observe the forty full days of meat abstinence. In Argentina, every tradition is under dispute. Today’s classics are tomorrow's heresy. The mistakes of today are the laws of the future. The crisis of tomorrow isn’t a possibility but rather a certainty, an inevitable and unpredictable cycle on a constant loop of our national identity.
What I want to say is that on my third attempt I boiled the chinchulines. I boiled them and then grilled them and they were really good. Sorry, Laucha. I went with my gut feeling.
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The text was translated from Spanish. Minor changes were made for readability and context.
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Juan Francisco Moretti. Reader, teacher, poet, writer and author of the novel Desvío (available in Spanish and Portuguese). He also writes scripts for radio and theater. He likes stories that take advantage of their form: short stories, novellas, theater, comics, films, songs and video games. He lives in Buenos Aires with a journalist and a cat. You can read more of his work here.
Milagros Brascó. Illustrator and graphic designer. Her work generally gravitates to gastronomy. She was raised and has worked in many restaurants and studied to be a sommelier. You can find her on Instagram.