Kitchen bloodlust

In the market in Algeciras there’s a butcher who specialises in bull meat. He sells two kinds. There’s meat from bulls slaughtered in the abattoir, and then there’s meat from bulls slaughtered in the ring. Toro de lidia, as it’s known. The latter flesh is dense and dark, with only the leanest coating of fat. It’s the flesh of an animal that’s lived for several years roaming free in hilly pastures, contact with humans kept to a minimum. It’s also the flesh of an animal that died in excruciating pain, tortured to death, some might say, for the sake of entertainment, tradition and culture.

The flesh of a toro de lidia is a delicacy in Spain, but it’s not the nicest meat by a long shot. It’s pumped full of adrenalin and lactic acid, the inevitable effects of 20 minutes in the ring. It needs heavy cooking and strong flavours, and lots of red wine. But the meat, once cooked for several hours on a slow heat, becomes tender, rich and full-flavoured. It makes for a succulent, earthy, hearty meal. Even so, it’s not for everyone, and taste is the least of it.

Why on earth would anyone want to watch a bullfight, let alone eat the bull afterwards? It’s a question I’ve often been asked, and one to which I have no answer. I could, I suppose, talk about how these animals live for five or six years in the wild before their time in the ring. How they get to run around with a herd of cows, procreating and doing what all bulls should be doing. In my book, that beats being factory-farmed for your milk or your low cost meat.  I suppose it’s a lot less disturbing to buy a steak from the supermarket, packed in a Styrofoam tray and wrapped in cling film stamped with a clearly-visible ‘sell by’ date. Or eating a hamburger without a second thought to where it came from. But at least there’s no hypocrisy in eating toro de lidia. You can’t pretend that what you’ve got on your chopping board wasn’t alive at some point, especially if you saw it die the night before. My mate Ned says such comparisons make for a poor excuse. Moral relativism, he calls it. ‘One thing is OK because it’s better than another, the lesser of two evils’. Well, maybe it is a poor excuse, but it still makes sense to me.

   

Even so, these comparisons only go so far. Ultimately, there’s a morbid fascination in all of this, what the Spanish food writer Pepe Iglesias calls “…a halo of magic and mystery that one should not try to explain rationally.” He says eating toro de lidia answers some long-lost instinct, the feast after a violent, bloody struggle for food. I don’t quite buy it, I have to confess, but he touches on something. Perhaps subscribing to his view is also a cop out, an easy way of ducking difficult questions. Ned, of course, sums it up quite simply, and rather less flamboyantly: “You’ve got bloodlust.”

Maybe they’re both right on some level. How on earth can I justify what I’m about to eat to any right-thinking human being? How can I explain away what’s in the pot and get away with it? I can’t, but I’m still going to eat it.

Next, the recipe.