First came a platter of offal: curly, pleasantly mealy intestines, creamy sweetbreads, spicy chorizo, and fat black blood sausages, the particularly delectable “sweet” version larded with walnuts and raisins. I was almost finished with that when the next platter arrived. On it was a large helping of asado de tira, which we would call short ribs, along with a slab of skirt steak and what the French call entrecôte. I was slowing down when the final platter showed up: a succulent T-bone, a hunk of bife de chorizo, as rump steak is confusingly named, and the vegetable course: juicy corn and earthy boniatos, both grown in the field behind the restaurant and roasted in the coals.
Other diners trickled in as I ate, but I paid little attention. I was engaged in asado, and it was everything I remembered from all those years ago: an almost religious celebration of the possibilities of beef and fire.
The meat tasted of the essence of beef—rich, deep, full, with an undercurrent of slightly brassy bloodiness (not from being rare; nowhere did anyone ask me how I wanted my meat cooked, and it was uniformly closer to medium than medium-rare) but not even a whisper of livery flavor. It was also much less tender than grain-fed American beef. But to me, the flavor of this meat, from cows that roam at will through the Pampas feeding on grass and clover and drinking from wide rivers, made it worth a bit of chew.
When at last I pushed back from the table, the owner walked over and handed me a small plastic statue of a gaucho. “Un recuerdo,” he said. “A souvenir.” It was hideously ugly, and I was tempted to toss it out a few days later when I was packing to leave the country. But the gesture had seemed heartfelt, so I tossed it into my suitcase, instead. It still sits on a shelf in my apartment, a reminder of the day that I vindicated a golden memory of my youth—and, more importantly, ate some really great beef.
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