Audrey Ferber, Meat, from Eating Our Hearts Out: Personal Accounts of Women's Relationship to Food, edited by Leslea Newman, The Crossing Press, 1993.
[ID: Meat by Audrey Ferber After another hot summer afternoon of punchball and pots, I opened our screen door and was greeted by a lovely vision. My mother, in a starched half-apron, bent over the broiler. The kitchen was full of the aroma of cooking lamb. She was grilling lamb chops, just for me. I put my arms around her waist and watched as she sprinkled the chops with garlic powder, paprika, and celery salt. She swatted my wrist as I tried to put my finger in the bottom of the pain to touch the hot orangey grease. The table was set for one with a light-colored raffia place mat. Most of my friends were allowed soda only on special occasions, but I had it every night. My mother had already poured my cold ginger ale into a tall, thin glass etched with stars, and had folded my napkin into a triangular shape. “Food should look as good as it tastes,” she said, arranging my chops, mashed potatoes, and peas with a carrot curl for eye appeal on one of our new amoeba-patterned plates. She sat with me as I ate. The fat crackled around the edges of the chop as I cut in with my serrated knife. I knew from watching my friends and my older brother eat that not everyone loved fat the way I did. Secretly, I thought of those people as prissy, the trimmers that spent so much time cutting and discarding, that by the time they got to their meat, it was reduced in size by half and ice cold. Once I was in the flow of eating a lambchop, I didn’t stop. The potatoes were bland. I ate a few forkfuls, just the parts that had absorbed the juices from the lamb. The peas were wrinkled. It was hard for me to get excited about other foods in the presence of meat. After cutting some pieces from the eye of the chop, as few as it took convince my mother I was civilized, I picked the bone up in my hand. No knife was as effective as my incisors for locating the tastiest bits of meat. The lamb was tan and brown and pink and grey, a meat rainbow, and had the feel of wadded flannel against my teeth. Runnels of grease dripped down my fingers. After I had gnawed the bone clean, I tongued the marrow. My mother didn’t approve of this “hands on” eating style in public, but on nights we were alone, she never criticized my manners. “Will you have lamb chops for dinner too?” I asked smiling up at her, the hardened fat around my mouth cracking like paraffin. “Yes. I’ll make a steak for your father, but I prefer lamb.” she told me, confidingly. I knew it. I had sensed my love of lamb was something special between my mother and me, something we shared. Maybe it was because we were women. Maybe it was because we were smart. And there was something else about lamb. It had a winey, almost uric smell that I connected to love, to dark, grown-up sensuality, and to my period, which I expected to start any minute in the next three or four years. Steak was tough, masculine. My father probably need the blood meat so he’d have enough strength to take the subway and work all day standing on his feet. I turned down my mother’s offer of dessert. Fruit cocktail would have disturbed the salty, garlicky harmony of flavors in my mouth. We sat in silence. I was sated, and could feel her pleasure in my having eaten so well. My fingers left smudges on the chrome strips around the dinette table. Outside, the day had turned to dusk in meaty shades of pink and gray. End ID]
