Cooking with Nick: Horse Tartar
The French have a long and proud history of loosing wars against almost every nation they share a border with, a few they don't, and even loosing a couple wars against themselves to practice in their spare time. It's only fitting then that the culinary dish at the center of their national identity is a bloody slab of uncooked meat. Delicious!
So, without further ado I bring you a traditional French recipe for horse tartar as taught to me during my stay in Carcassonne.
Ingredients you'll need:
- 200 grams of minced horse tartar fresh from the local butcher. Except not from the butcher you thought to visit, as he apparently specializes exclusively in rabbits. Expect to wander through at least 5 different butcher shops trying to figure out which one serves what.
- 3 Red onions. Though that's only if you don't like onions much. If you're feeling particularly French, feel free to use 5-12 entire bulbs.
- An entire bottle of olive oil. However, to get the taste just right you must first prepare it by bragging to everyone within earshot about how fresh and local it is. Bonus points if you crushed the olives yourself this very morning.
- Parsley. But if it comes in a vial, can, or is in some other way sensibly stored then it's not real parsley. Always keep an unruly, sickly looking batch growing in your kitchen to show off how organically minded you are on the off chance a friend asks you to help them with a meal.
- An unwashed European egg. This isn't some snarky French thing, you really don't want to use an American egg for this.
- Fine French mustard. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between French and American variants, but they taste and look nothing alike.
- A particularly phallic cucumber to make crass jokes about. Surely everyone will think you hilarious.
- Lettuce.
- Worcestershire sauce.
Tools you'll need:
- Two organic, locally sourced human hands.
- A knife that can finely dice vegetables and hands.
- A bowl
Steps:
- Take the meat and plop it unceremoniously into the bowl.
- Dice the onions and parsley into incredibly fine bits. The teensier the better. Then pile it into the bowl until you can no longer see the meat.
- Pour in some arbitrary amount of olive oil and massage the oily horse concoction while silently crying to yourself. Hopefully only because of the onions.
- Lightly salt with tears or table-salt based on preference. If using table-salt, take this opportunity to extol the miraculous life-enhancing virtues of proper Himalayan pink crystal salt. Adding your ego to the mixture enhances the flavor far more than impure rock shavings ever could.
- Continue to knead the goopy, oily onion mass while adding in a spoonful each of worstichere sauce and mustard. Add in more of both as taste dictates. Feel free to ignore the tartar completely and just start eating mustard from the jar. As taste dictates, of course.
- Let the tartar sit a second, and prepare a plate by covering it with lettuce and cucumber slices.
- Dump the tartar atop the lettuce plate.
- Do your best to shape the tartar into a cute little mound, and dig out a little divot in the center.
- Use an ingenious, original, and showy method to crack the European egg open, then use the shell to separate the yellow from the white. If you accidentally break the yolk, make sure you came up with a good excuse ahead of time. It's despicably un-French to accidentally break a yolk while showing off, and you may just loose your citizenship if anyone finds out.
- Plop the yolk into the little divot you made in your sticky onion pile.
- Fun fact corner: In America, the FDA legally mandates that all eggs must be washed before being shipped to store shelves for sanitation reasons. However, washing an eggshell causes it to become porous, allowing nastiness to get in. Thus why American eggs must always be cooked before consumption.
- However, in Europe eggs are never washed before retail, and if there's hay and crud still on the shell from the farm, then oh well.
Bon Apatite!
Personally, I'd like to reproduce this substituting onion, worstichere, and parsley for avocado, lemon, and garlic, respectively. Maybe a bit of rosemary would work too.