When it comes to dinner, goat and I have a troubled relationship. It stems mostly from a leg I was served once in the Galápagos—more bone and gristle than flavor—but my antipathy has been kept alive over the years by the odd goat roti I’ve encountered here and there. Still, I’ve always been willing to give it another chance.
So when my husband and I were invited to a goat dinner in Luperón, a small waterfront town near Puerto Plata, on the north coast of the Dominican Republic (where we are living), I warily agreed to go along. After all, chivo is a traditional part of la comida criolla. It’s also the sole traditional Dominican dish that is served picante, and I adore hot food.
In fact, this Dominican goat was tender and flavorful —more spicy than hot—the meat having first been rubbed with garlic and oregano, then cooked with onions, peppers, more garlic and oregano, a bit of tomato paste, white wine, and a healthy splash of overproof Dominican rum. It was served with mashed auyama, a basketball-size squash, with slivers of crisp fried red onion mixed in—perfect for soaking up every last bit of delicious gravy.
"But the goat you get here isn’t the best," protested Jaime, a Luperón-born-and-bred Dominican, when I told him the next day how much I had enjoyed the meal. Though he’s rail thin, Jaime is a big eater, and he had been feeding us regular advice on the subject of food since we met. "The best goat comes from Monte Cristi because the goats there graze on hillsides where wild oregano grows." By the time the meat reaches the kitchen, he explained, it’s already infused with the flavor of fresh herbs. Premarinated, if you will.
Monte Cristi is at the northwest end of the country, close to the Haitian border, where the land is mostly inhospitable desert. "You must try the Monte Cristi goat," Jaime insisted.
The Dominican Republic’s main highway slices the island like a machete cleaving a green coconut. We joined it only a dozen miles beyond the urban sprawl of Santiago, the country’s second-largest city, and already it had narrowed to a single lane in each direction, paved but punctuated by occasional washouts and tire-gobbling holes. Rising abruptly from flat fields first of tobacco and then of rice, the mountains of the Cordillera Septentrional form a lush wall to the north, their peaks torn from tissue paper and layered one soft green sheet atop the other.
Driving in the D.R., we discovered, demands the reflexes of a rally racer. Chickens cross the road without anyone asking why, and campesinos on burros and horses trot along the shoulders. Motoconchos—small-engined motorcycles with three or four people astride or maybe a live pig trussed on the back—buzz by on both sides, while diesel-belching trucks labor under loads of pineapples or bananas and motion impatient drivers to pass in the short stretches between curves. (Or, just as often, on curves.) We bounced through small pueblos where signs announced the ubiquitous club gallístico (cock-fighting arena) or—hallelujah—a gomería (tire-repair shop).
Soon the land became more arid, and the silky, neon-green rice fields gave way to scrubby bush and tall cactus. Small, open-sided stands began to pepper the roadside, one after the other, with fresh goat carcasses and "goat bacon" (sun-dried carcasses) hoisted under their thatch roofs. For those who pre-fer to purchase their meat on the hoof, the live item was tethered to a post. Interspersed with the stands were paradas, roadside restaurants, advertising stewed goat, oven-roasted goat, and goat picante, the signs showing crude horned silhouettes. We had clearly arrived in goat country.
No, we didn’t want to buy a goat, we told the young man pre-siding over the carcasses at one stand. But where should we eat it? Two ladies walking past piped up: "La Madonna, around the next curve."
I was not convinced: La Madonna’s two open-sided, thatch-roofed palapas were set only a car’s length back from the road, with plastic chairs, tables covered in burgundy leatherette, a healthy population of flies, and no menu; the only main course on offer was goat, either horneado (roasted) or guisado (stewed). We crossed our fingers and ordered one of each, accompanied by tostones (double-fried sliced green plantain), salad, rice, and beans.
Like the goat in luperón, the meat had been roughly butchered here, making bone an expected part of the dish. But this goat meat was different—more tender, and permeated with a rich, smoky, herbal flavor. It was particularly obvious in the simply roasted horneado, which had no sauce to boost its taste. Both ways, it was a knockout, and we left only a pile of well-cleaned bones.
Slight, round-faced, 70-year-old Julián Tatis was the man behind the pots here: "El maestro del chivo," his family calls him. (Also the master of procreation: He’s a father of 20, he told me right off the bat.) People travel for hours to eat at La Madonna, and those who have moved off the island—like the New Yorker sitting at the table next to ours—insist on a visit when they return home. Some weeks, Julián and his assistant cook 100 goats, not just for the restaurant but also to fill orders from people in Santo Domingo and Santiago.
The meat carried the "sabor del orégano," Julián confirms, because the goats did indeed graze on the wild herb. But there’s more to La Madonna goat than that. "This chivo is entirely different from the other chivo," Valentín Tatis said, as he pointed between a pot of horneado and a pot of guisado. He is one of Julián’s sons—two generations of the family work at the parade, and a dozen of them had crowded into the kitchen to watch the gringa learn to cook.
His father decided to test me: "¿Qué pasa con el horneado?" he asked. I stammered back through the various steps for making roasted goat, starting with the lime-juice-and-water bath that rids the meat of any strong smell. As I listed the ingredients for the seasoning mixture, which is then pushed into slits cut in the flesh, Valentín recited each one back at me and Julián just smiled: mucho garlic and black pepper, a little oil and lime juice, salt, crumbled dried oregano leaves, onion, and green pepper.
The kitchen at La Madonna was open on two sides, with a pile of firewood in the middle of its dirt floor and goat carcasses hanging from hooks in the ceiling. A series of fogones—wood fires—runs along one of the sides, with a heavy pot supported by cinder blocks bubbling above each one. There were no ovens here: The horneado goat is roasted by covering the pot with a flat metal sheet partway through its three-hour cooking time and shoveling burning chunks of wood on top, so the heat comes from underneath and above.
Julián’s chivo guisado is simplicity itself. The meat is cooked until tender with just oregano, garlic, salt, and pepper. Then onion, a little lime juice, a bit of tomato sauce, and water are added to make a gravy. "Nothing more," said Valentín. The free-ranging, oregano-grazing goats of la línea noroeste—the northwest line, as the region bordering Haiti is called (which is also why this style of goat is called chivo liniero)—don’t need much in the way of added ingredients.
Despite all the miles, we’d yet to see a herd of grazing goats. "They’re in the mountains," Julián said, waving a hand toward the northwest. And so we headed 25 miles farther, toward the town of Monte Cristi. The hills crept closer and the landscape became dustier, until the road ended at the ocean.
That evening, Claudio Peña—Caito to his friends—took us to see his cousin’s and his uncle’s goat corrals. "It’s not far," he assured us, but his idea of not far covered a lot more ground than mine—especially when we were bumping at ten miles per hour along an unpaved, unlit, heavily washboarded track, and dusk was falling. "Keep going, keep going," he said, when we slowed for a small herd of goats moving along the shoulder. "There will be more, many more."
He wasn’t kidding. His uncle Moreno’s corrals hold hundreds of the animals, a blur of black and white and chestnut in the fading light. They are let out of their corrals in the morning, Caito explained, to head into the hills, where they spend the day grazing, as do the goats from many other corrals. At day’s end, they regroup with their herd and make their own way back to the correct corral.
Caito pulled a handful of pods off a tree to show me a fruit they also eat. But I hadn’t seen any of the oregano that’s responsible for their sabor. That’s because I was looking for the garden-variety plants I was used to back home. Moreno walked us to a shrub that was easily four feet high, and crumbled a handful of its leaves. The air was suddenly awash with oregano. "In the hills, the bushes are larger than this one," Caito said. "Like small trees."
As darkness fell, Moreno closed the corral and we bumped our way back down the track, back to our hotel, back to a late dinner. Goat, of course.