Even when reading a cookbook, you can get a sense of why the Chinese had 
their revolution. You’ll learn that during the Qing Dynasty, for the rich folk a “light” meal consisted of over 40 courses, while dinner ran well over 100. This during a period when most of the citizenry subsisted on rice and a little soya. Rulers then were fond of dishes such as Jade Chicken, which required cooks to patiently peel mountains of grapes, or Bird’s Nest Soup, which necessitated employment of a stable of young girls “with perfect vision,” tasked with but one job: removing feathers and fluff from the nests of sea swallows.
But of course nowhere on the planet today are things quite so decadent and outre. Right?
Wrong. As Lance says in Apocalypse Now: “Jim, it’s here. It really is here.”
Here in the June 22 edition of the New Yorker, in a dotty little review of a Park Avenue tapas joint, La Fonda Del Sol:
Among the tapas . . . lamb dressed with hot peppers and roasted on a bed of grass from the field in which the lamb once grazed. The dinner version of this dish is stewed in yogurt made with the milk of the lamb’s mother.
I don’t think any more needs to be said.
But, but, but…
Little lambie tastes so darned good. Can you ever forgive us carnivores?
I do admit the description is pretentious and unbelievable to the max. Funny in fact if one ignores the reality of the animal’s short life.
Peace, Jerry
Carnivores forgiven. ; )
I don’t eat lamb meself, but it’s popular in this house: last night, in fact, I made an Italian version of Lamb and Tomato stew.
I suppose that back in the day when people raised, slaughtered, and consumed their own lamb, it might not have been odd to bake the beast on grass it once frolicked upon, or to serve it in yogurt made from milk from its mother.
But, to me, there’s something creepy, decadent, even sadistic about serving it in this manner in a restaurant in NYC on Park Avenue. Clearly, the lamb is not being raised out back. The creature must come from some far-away place, where there actually is grass. Each lamb must be slaughtered there and then shipped twinned with containers of its own grass and its own mother’s milk. Awfully . . . premeditated.
I suspect the grass and milk for those restaurants is all hype and not much substance. We raised animals and slaughtered animals at home in my childhood but we would never have gone so far as to do what the restaurant advertises. That is abhorrent to me, too.
Peace.