Cabritada

We slaughtered a goat this afternoon. It was an impressive sight. My friend Aldo sharpened a large kitchen knife and a short, blunt machete. The goat, a black one, lay on its side, its hooves tied together with a dirty, frayed piece of rope. Aldo knelt beside it and the rest of us pinned down various of the goat’s appendages. It struggled and bleated. Its brown tongue protruded from between its teeth. All of this was taking place inside a dirt patio in the house of Maximina, one of the artesanas with whom I work. Aldo’s son brought a small washpan and forced it underneath the goat’s neck. Aldo slit its throat with the kitchen knife and foamy blood from its jugular and larynx shot into the washpan, nearly filling it. Aldo kept sawing away at its neck until he’d cut entirely through the larynx and into the spine. There were puddles of blood and flecks of meat and bone in the dirt and a couple of dogs were lapping up the blood and some pullets were darting around, peeping, and pecking at the bits of bone and meat.

When the goat was completely still Aldo cut through the hide of one of its shanks and forced a short length of plastic tubing under the skin and blew into the tube to loosen the skin along the length of the leg. He did the same with its three other legs. Several other knives were brought out to the patio and sharpened. Aldo, Maximina and Aldo’s son started to skin the goat with the knives. Aldo slid the knife between the belly and the skin quickly, efficiently and expertly without puncturing the hide and without damaging the meat. The blade slipped between the meat and the skin and the skin peeled away leaving large patches of white fat interrupted by reddish gashes of exposed muscle, which continued to twitch along the ribcage, above the heart of the now headless animal.

When they’d skinned the entire carcass Aldo cut open its anus and carved out the rectal area and then split apart the ribs with the machete and pulled out the organs and the huge bloated white sack of its stomach and manhandled them into a washtub. Then he cut off the hooves, threaded a rope between the remaining bones of the two forelegs, and hoisted the carcass into a short, thick, white tree growing in the patio. He washed down the carcass with a bucket of water and meanwhile three women took the washtubful of entrails out into the back yard. First they salvaged the heart, liver, kidneys and some other organs that I was having trouble identifying. Then they unwound the intestines, cut them away from the stomach, and began to chop them into short segments. They squeezed greenish shit out of each segment and then poured water through it to cleanse it. Then they ran a stick through each segment and scoured the interior of the gut by bunching it along the stick, washed it a second time and dropped it into a washpan of fresh water that one of the women had brought from the well. As they cleaned the segments of intestine nearer the stomach the green shit they emptied from the length of intestine began to retain its solidity and texture, that of clumps of grass. Finally they cut open the stomach, which emitted a foul odor of partially digested vegetation, and emptied its copious contents into a ditch that ran behind the house. Someone kicked a dog that had been manuevering about, trying to rob scraps, and the dog yelped and skulked away. They cleaned the stomach, whose lining looked like shaggy wet fleece, and threw it into the washpan with the tripe.

When we went back inside Aldo was hacking up the carcass with the machete. The pullets were underfoot, peeping and pecking at splinters of bone. Some guinea pigs were scurrying around on the floor of a pen made of stacked bricks. In Perú we eat guinea pigs, too. The women had begun to cook the tripe and Edith, another of the artesanas, and María, a woman with several gold front teeth, were washing the hunks of meat that Aldo had hacked apart and cutting them into individual portions. Earlier Aldo had split the carcass in half and had weighed each half with a spring scale and each half had weighed 11 kilos. That meant that the goat had rendered nearly fifty pounds of meat and bone.

The goat will be served tomorrow at a “cabritada”—a fundraising effort for the group of artisans with which I’m working.