retro: the way to my heart

I love milanesa. Of all the foods I tried in Paraguay, milanesa is one of perhaps three that I would voluntarily choose to eat over, say, fried cardboard. It's a pretty simple dish, just pieces of thinly-sliced beef or chicken, breaded and fried, often with a dash of cumin. It's not so different from chicken-fried steak, I guess, except that chicken-fried steak is uniformly disgusting, whereas milanesa is a gustatory delight. Don't ask me to explain the wind, okay?

One evening in mid-July, my partners and I returned from our mid-summer break/training session to find that our host mother had made milanesa for dinner. Thank God. Finally, something we actually wanted to eat. Dude Partner and I dug in happily while Lady Partner, a committed vegetarian, looked on.

As we ate, DP and I discussed the food in front of us. Was it chicken or beef, we wondered? It looked too pale to be beef, but it didn't taste like chicken either. Curious, we peeled away the breading to get a better look at the meat within. This was a mistake. The meat looked distressingly gooey, as though someone had blown his or her nose onto it before frying it up. We chewed more slowly, pondering this development. The milanesa was awfully hard to cut. And it was so chewy, like trying to sink your teeth into a whoopee cushion.

"What kind of meat is this?" we asked our host brother.

He shook his head. "No, no, it's not meat."

The generic word for meat in Spanish mainly refers to beef or pork, which explains why our vegetarian partner was frequently served chicken and, disturbingly, hot dogs. ("I'm sorry, I don't eat meat." "...and?") We tried again. "What animal is it from?"

This he could answer. "Cow."

Well, that narrowed it down. "What part of the cow?"

Mouth full of the mystery non-meat, he merely hammered on his chest.

My partners and I fell into a hushed, heated debate. Heart? No, heart would be too tough. Lungs? Who eats lungs, anyway? Pancreas? Gallbladder? God, what else was even in the chest?

By this time, our host brother was laughing at us. "Tripa," he said patiently. "It's tripa."

Tripa. Sounded like - but, no, that wasn't in the chest. The guy had worked at a carcinería, a meatpacking factory. Surely he knew where the damn stomach was.

Well...he didn't.

At least the milanesa was edible, if somewhat less appealing after we registered its gummy, goopy nature for what it was. The real challenge came a week later, while our supervisor was visiting. Strangely enough, our sup was also a vegetarian, so it was a particularly bad night for our host mother to serve Broiled Stomach Pilaf.

The milanesa had masqueraded well, but this dish was unmistakably composed of offal. Fat, rubbery chunks of stomach nestled on a bed of plain rice. The smell was nauseating. The "meat" was plain, unadorned. It was unashamedly stomach, grayish and weirdly furry on one side. My partners and supervisor and I stared at it, and then each other, each silently running through the same list of options.

A. Eat it. Die.

B. Don't eat it, thereby insulting host mother and risking starvation. Die.

C. Flee on foot, heading for the mountains. Stumble upon the ghost monkeys or the rumored al-Qaeda training cell. Die.

The future was bleak.

Daringly, our supervisor attempted to cut the Gordian knot with an advanced weasel maneuver. "I'm sorry," she simpered apologetically, eyes artfully wide and innocent in her face. "I'm awfully sorry, but the thing is, I'm a vegetarian."

Our host mother frowned. "So?"

Thrown by this brusque response, our supervisor faltered slightly, then pushed on. "Well, I mean, I don't eat meat." Her eyes were growing wider by the second. She looked not unlike a Bratz doll.

"It's not meat," our host mother said, shoving a forkful of innards into her mouth.

Our sup was persistent. "But, you see, I don't eat any part of the animal." Clear, straightforward, unambiguous. Even a master weasel like our host mother couldn't argue with that.

"Ah," our mother said, appearing to concede. "I see. Well, why don't you wait a moment, and I'll get you something else." She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

It seemed that, against all odds, our sup had emerged victorious. She flashed us a triumphant smile. "Was that so hard?" she whispered, a touch patronizingly.

But we had all underestimated the magnitude of our host mother's cunning. Our sup realized her mistake moments later, as Mommie Dearest returned from the kitchen, self-satisfied smile firmly in place, with a plate piled high with cold, slimy hot dogs.