OXEN OF THE SUN
After resting in my room for an hour or two, I come down for dinner. The restaurant is now full with about a half-dozen guests, all of them staying for the night. I decide to live regally, as much as that is possible in a very rural casa rural. I join my odd but engaging French friend Guillaume at a table for dinner, and also chat with the other guests and with our host Xavi.
We have some great wine from Rioja, which is Spain’s Napa and is on the Camino Francés. (When I walked through Rioja last year, I saw mile after mile of vineyards.) Guillaume wants to order a house specialty called “chuletas de buey,” which is 1.1 kilograms of meat and is intended for two people. He wants me to share it with him. I am reluctant to eat that much meat, and even more so when I read the supposed translation into English that appears on the menu: “Ox chops.”
Whaaaat?? OX?!!
I assume that that must be a mistake in the translation. So, I look it up in the “menu decoder” of my Lonely Planet dictionary. Damn if it doesn’t say the same thing: “Ox chops.”
I didn’t even know that people eat ox. I do, however, vaguely recall possibly eating a dish several weeks ago called “chuletas de buey” and thinking that it was steak from an animal called a COW, of which there are tens of thousands around here. But an OX? I don’t think I have ever seen one here.
In fact, the only ox I ever knew of was Babe the Blue Ox, who belonged to Paul Bunyan. It never occurred to me that Babe would be tasty, or that I would ever live to eat one of his grandchildren. But eat him I do. With a little persuasion from Xavi the host (well, more than a little), we order 1.1 kilograms of deboned, grilled strips of chuletas de buey, with a side of fries and a bunch of roasted hot peppers. The whole thing is delicious, and certainly is a carnivore’s delight. For a moment, I think I am with the Greek army feasting at night on piles of roasted meat after killing Trojans all day.
But then it occurs to me that the one guy I know who actually did feast on ox was Odysseus, when he (or at least his men) killed and ate the Oxen of Helios, the sun god. It was a bad mistake. Helios and Zeus took revenge for this desecration. The gods killed all of Odysseus’s men, left him shipwrecked on an island, and added 7 years to his journey home. Hello, family: After tonight’s meal, I may not see you again until the year 2022.
We have a great dinner, with lots of wine, while feasting on the Oxen of the Sun. The only trick now is to get home safely, and some time this year.