C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

Of all the Cabrales pictures I found while scouring Google Images, this seemed most to communicate the forbidding-ass, hoary, curmudgeonly flavor of this most formidable blue cheese.

Cabrales is a Spanish blue, usually from cow, but in the case of the piece I bought, a blend of sheep’s, goat’s and cow’s milk. Like other blues, it’s aged in caves until it’s pretty damn raw.

I bought mine at the Whole Foods in New York at Columbus Circle. I had no idea what I was in store for. I only picked it because it looked the most grumpy. It was sitting there on the far end of the blues, hunkered down, surly, like a grizzled, feral cat.

Anyhow, I got home, unwrapped it, tried it, and was stunned. This cheese is a troll grandfather whose savage breath makes you shut your eyes but whose zyklon war stories & randy secret-wife asides open them right the fuck back up.

In non-troll terms — it’s a tough cheese to love. It’s surprisingly acid, not very tender, sort of molar-sticky. But the flavor once you get past the bouncer is incredibly complex: woodsy-nutty, tangy, forceful, rich. It takes 5 or 10 seconds to really settle in. Language lets me down (or vice versa), and I don’t have the ready stock of adjectives/jargot that wine-nuts do — “vegetal”, “notes”, “tannins”, etc etc — so I’ll just say simply that the flavor is unlike that of any other blue I’ve tried, and is much stronger, more stubborn, and less cheese-like than I thought I could care for.

In this regard, it’s more like a hard red wine than a cheese. It makes your mouth sort of freak out and huddle (4th quarter time-out style) before rallying and realizing there was nothing to be afraid of after all — JUST STANKY BLUE LUV.

“The Zeus burger is considered the largest hamburger in the United States. This hamburger consists of a 7 pound burger and 5.5 pounds of toppings and home baked bun which has to be eaten in three hours.”

The text is taken from the hall of legendary burgers, part of the Association of Independent Competitive Eaters, a noble alliance of Hoagy Heroes committed to doing their durned best to “increase public awareness and acceptance of Competitive Eating as a sport and a form of entertainment.”

Their site even has a link devoted to the “Food Warriors.”

*** This reminded me of the time my friend Jason said that the U.S. should be renamed “CowboySexBurger”.I laughed, but was soon struck by how apt this was. The term seemed to sum up a good chunk of our country’s long-gathering lusts and obsessions: hypermasculinity, a reactionary over-consumption (inflamed in part by years of redstate exposure to liberal pro-veg. arguments), sex-gorging in all forms of media. Like Portnoy in a Marlboro-Man stetson hat, chewing skoal, raging on ‘roids, with his whang stuffed in a bucket full of bloody chuck.CowboySexBurger.

Adults nationwide increasingly incapable of normal sexual relations & increasingly turning to a slavering fever of manic consumption (conscious junk-eating being almost an act of power, of agency) to allay anxieties and frustrations they couldn’t gain insight into if their gravy fries depended on it.

Food Warriors.

CowboySexBurger.

It makes me think of guacamole gladiators, brandishing buttered short-swords, pouring catsup libations on the graves of our noble, kentuckyfried fallen, covering their eyes with thin discs of prosciutto.

So support your troops, your Competitive Eaters. Watch them salute each other before gut-battle with a fork clang, swearing oaths by laying hands on the consecrated meatball.

And our soldiers need more than just support. They need chicken wings & pepperoni sticks. Moreover, they need you to root out the enemy from within: throw tripe-scraps on any underfed commie twig-eater art-fag you see. These are people who hate America.

More importantly, these are people who hate ham.

We’ve come too far to let them stop us. Call on Zeus, call on Burgers, worship a porkchop and let the Butter Battles Begin.

I remember the juice’s vivid stains all over the cutting board, finding dried droplets days later around my white stove. It was a messy first eating, I didn’t know what I was doing. I gave myself up to clawing and gouging out the little seeds like jewels or eyes.

It’s become a kind of careful surgery for me. The prodding, coaxing a seed-cluster from the snug membrane, itself like a birth sac. But sometimes I get impatient and take bites, membrane and all, and just use my tongue to push out seeds and spit out the rest. It feels cannibalistic to eat one sometimes, like I’m violating something. Other times I feel like I’m privy to secrets just by looking inside one, groping for the right spot to nudge out a seedbundle. Then it’ll hit me, this mild awe that I’m privileged enough to be let into it, the spilling red, the little white partitions, the sweet roe, the delicate seed-sanctums.