taste of hoof

Janelle knocked on my door at 5pm to invite me to a quick bite with Michelle, Tai the Uighur man, and Patty, also a Uighur man. Tai wanted us to try a special Uighur dish. We walked around the corner of the hotel to a place that served what I had identified earlier as sheep lard heaped up with coiled sausages. Turns out it is not lard but lung, distended with a water and flour mix and then boiled or steamed in large cakes that only look like lard, white and soft and smooth. These cakes are cut into bite-sized pieces and submerged in a sheep-based broth and served with cuts of the sausage, which is the large intestine packed with rice and spices and very little meat. The sausage and the lung were innocuous enough – so much flour and rice that they didn’t taste like an animal product, just poor people’s protein-free nourishment – and they took on the unremarkable salty cilantro flavor of the broth. I nodded and mmmed and generally tried to seem like a gracious guest. Of course Tai would want us to like the special cuisine of his culture. But most disgusting was the sheep hoof I sampled. I was thinking that because I like chicken feet at dim sum I would find something redeeming about the sheep hoof too. But no. It was brought to us on a little dish covered in a plastic bag (to obviate the need for washing dishes, I think), the hoof and the first two joints above it, totaling about six inches of lower leg. It had been boiled until the bones disconnected and the skin and tendons sloughed off. There was no meat, just a few ounces of skin and connective tissue, so nothing for your teeth to take purchase on. The texture was first slimy and then gummy, so that everything stuck to your teeth. There were patches of black hair on parts of the hoof. I didn’t touch the hoof nail, didn’t feel the need to nibble on another beast’s keratin. It tasted so strongly of sheep meat, gamey and head-filling, except much more like armpit or crotch or something hot, sweaty, and inappropriate, perhaps because it was the closest part of the animal to the mud and shit and piss on the ground, or maybe just because the texture coated your teeth and mouth and throat and so the smell lingered after the swallow. I took a bite and decided I could take no more. I’m not usually squeamish, but I didn’t see why I should finish something that I felt so strongly negative about. I apologized profusely for my inability to finish and tried to make up for it by eating as much lung as I could take.