I Ate Raw Meat for Dinner

Last night Facundo dragged me to what seems like the millionth all-latino birthday party I´ve been to with him. Not that I don´t like birthday parties. It´s just that when you get anymore than five latinos together, they start slurring their speech like crazy. It´s like Facundo completely switches languages when he talks to other latinos, because I am suddenly unable to understand what he or anyone else is saying. Alcohol would have helped in this situation, but I wasn´t in the mood to drink, so I had to soberly endure pretending I understood what was going on and inserting a polite laugh in all the right places. To make matters worse, the party attendees were primarily Chileans, which made understanding the conversations doubly more difficult. I still struggle with comprehending Chilean slang, and even Facundo told me he was having trouble following what was going on because of it. As soon as he told me this, I resigned myself to remaining silent, because if my Spanish speaking boyfriend can´t even understand his own language, I am beyond help.

The party would have been as unmemorable as all the other latino parties I have been to were it not for the crudo that the host served for dinner. Crudo is a special Chilean ¨delicacy¨ that, if you didn´t know what it was, you might want to try, just because Chileans absolutely rave about it. But as soon as you realize that crudo is actually ground up raw beef with lemon, salt, and cilantro, you are somewhat sickened. I grew up being taught that raw meat is a food for dogs and that it is not safe because it may contain e-coli and other scary shit like that. But apparently the Chileans didn´t get that memo, because they love that shit.

I first heard of crudo when I was in Valdivia in February. Down there crudo (also known as Tartaro, which is a version of crudo containing raw eggs) is extremely popular, and it is a ritual of sorts for groups of men to get together and eat piles and piles of crudo on toast and drink beer. I first witnessed this at a German bar called Kuntsmann in Puerto Varas. A bunch of raunchy dudes were sitting at a table next to us, drinking lots of beer and talking loudly and eating this messy raw hamburger meat with onions and eggs in it. It looked so nasty. In my opinion, this was man going back to his state of nature: eating raw, bloody meat like pigs. I swore to myself I would never try that disgusting-looking dish.

However, last night I was virtually forced to try it. At first I refused to eat it on principle, but after awhile my hunger really started to get to me. That and Facundo was sitting next to me wolfing it down and going on and on about how delicious it was. So finally I reluctantly spread a little bit of crudo onto a piece of toast and prayed that the meat didn´t contain e-coli.

And, of course, the crudo was delicious.

It didn´t taste so much like raw meat because the lemon and cilantro flavors dominated. Supposedly the lemon in crudo does the job of ¨cooking¨ the meat so that it is safe to eat. As an added bonus, the meat didn´t look very raw, either. It was sort of brown, so I didn´t feel so repulsed. But really, the crudo was quite good. I think I would eat it again, but definitely not with raw eggs in it. This particular crudo didn´t contain raw eggs, fortunately. I would never have tried it otherwise. Raw meat is bad enough, but with raw eggs mixed in it´s just too much.

The picture I´ve attached is actually Tartaro, the crudo that contains raw eggs. The meat in this picture is much redder than the meat I had last night, and looks a lot more disgusting. But it stays pretty true to the essence of crudo.

So in conclusion, I´ve officially eaten raw meat. And liked it.