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The lamb shank, a notoriously dense piece of fauna that requires a surprisingly lengthy period of contemplation in a hot, wet environment to achieve a state of agreeable submission, is, against all culinary logic, astonishingly forgiving. Should you leave it braising for an hour too long – a perfectly reasonable timeframe for one to forget one is cooking anything at all – the worst that will happen is that it becomes slightly more enthusiastic about departing the bone than you intended. If, however, it remains stubbornly resistant to the fork, simply maintain the heat; a summer’s day, in its infinite lack of hurry, is on your side.
But, and this is where we encounter the inexplicable poetry of flavor, you must brown the shank. It is, frankly, a terrible shape for even browning, yet you must persist, for this fleeting interaction between high heat and muscle tissue is the fundamental, often-ignored bedrock of all decent slow-cooked stews. Failure to properly brown the meat is rather like building a house without gravity – a feat achievable, perhaps, but one that leaves you deeply suspicious of the foundations. And who needs suspicion when they're about to eat?
The red wine sauce is, of course, the traditional and entirely predictable partner to the lamb shank, a pairing established centuries ago by people who had simply run out of any other ideas. One imagines they thought, "Well, the lamb tastes rather strongly of lamb, and the wine tastes rather strongly of wine. Perhaps if we combine them, they will cancel one another out, or at least distract us from the fact that we are about to eat a piece of leg."
The baffling thing is the sauce's initial simplicity. It is often nothing more than a collection of liquids one keeps meaning to get around to drinking, yet, after the prolonged slow cooking – a process which seems to violate several known laws of thermodynamics and certainly several rules about waiting patiently – it undergoes a stunning, almost arrogant, transformation.
What emerges is not merely a sauce, but an incredibly rich, deeply flavoured liquid, a substance so unnervingly silky and glossy that it appears to have been filtered through the sheer apathy of the world itself.
To accompany the slow cooked lamp skank I made rice. Plain Basmati rice cooked in plain water with half a package of plain butter.
In the spirit of slow-cooking we kissed for a long time after the meal, while attempting – and failing – to clear the table and rinse the plates in the kitchen sink, and moved on to slow lovemaking, eventually in the bedroom.
Nothing experimental or wild. On the contrary; slow missionary and cowgirl style, while she kept whispering naughtiness directly in my ear, using childish words in Danish, loosely translatable to “wee-wee” and “minge”, but doing so in a very adult asthmatic fashion.
After the lovemaking she walked out onto the balcony to light up a cigarette. Naked, sweaty, and with messy hair.
I’ve always wanted to be around people who are completely unfiltered, bursting with self-confidence, without regard for the faint of heart, but never managed to meet anyone who actually was, at the end of the day. So even if it pleased me, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it.
I had to bite my tongue not to say “are you sure about this?”
Not because it made me uncomfortable, but because it made me uncomfortable on her behalf. So, yes, uncomfortable. But not… You know what I mean.
I managed to not say anything, after restraining myself forcefully.
It was somehow like receiving a gift that is in every measurable way too much, and the immediate sensation was one of profound, slightly sticky unease. By all quantifiable measures it exceeded the generally accepted parameters of a polite exchange, thereby triggering a low-level, internal panic that manifested as several unsettling questions: Is this gift, in its sheer, uncompromising expense, secretly a form of unbearable, unrepayable debt? Am I worthy of such a spectacular potential regret? And, perhaps most troubling of all, the ancient, dreadful question surfaced from the damp cellar of the mind, whispering: "Am I, in the grand scheme of things, actually worthy of being in the vicinity of this much?" One suspects the answer is probably no.