Rudolph the Red Meat Side Dish

(As published by the Fairfield Weekly on December 20, 2007)

Ill apologize up front to anyone who sympathizes with reindeer this time of year (teachers, parents, children, vegetarians) because I fully endorse eating them.

It started with an uncle of mine who’s a head chef at a fancy Boston restaurant. He loves to cook up risky dishes for the family at Christmas. Once it was a hundred pieces of sushi that only he and I ate; another time it was fajitas and home-made (grilled!) salsa. He was outside in the snow grilling vegetables the whole morning that time. The best one though, was the reindeer he made in 2001.

After cueing the “red-nosed” song, he opened the oven and out came what looked like dark sliced beef, gently displayed on crackers with some sort of sauce and maybe some capers. He must have ordered a few pounds of the festive flesh for us, without letting anyone know what was in store.

“Come on down,” the chef yelled to the kids, “it’s time to eat Rudolph!” The adults were laughing and stuffing their faces with shrimp cocktail, hummus and Merlot while the youngest kids, at around three or four, cried when the drunken man in the chef’s hat kept insisting it was really Rudolph.

“Rudolph’s dead,” he said, “And I killed him for you! Eat up!” He either thought the kids would love the idea, or he knew they’d hate it. But he played the role very well, complete with his red-splattered smock (it was ketchup).

The two or three ethical members of the family wondered if it was right to be eating the holiday mascot—who’s making the rabbit stew for Easter?—but in the end it was too delicious to argue. If you’ve ever had kangaroo, reindeer tastes a little like that. If you haven’t, it’s like beef tenderloin. Smooth, flavorful and light as a feather.

But reindeer do not fly. They are like small moose. They are lazy, slow and stupid animals.

Canadian reindeer are the laziest, resting in roads all across the territories and running toward cars instead of back into the woods. They rest in the road because the roads serve as clearings from the miles and miles of thick forest, and they can sleep there without being bothered by mosquitoes. A smarter animal would worry about the cars and not the bugs, but reindeer seem to think they’re just as invincible as their fictional flying friends. I’ve read that a reindeer’s brain is a delicacy, and maybe that’s because they don’t use the brain for much else. Might as well eat it.

Tasteless? Well, Chez Uncle didn’t think there was anything wrong with his hors d’ ouerve.

“It’s like eating turkey on Thanksgiving,” he said.

It’s not anything like that. Rudolph was a red-nosed hero among heroes—a legend!—and not just a passive bird waddling in the woods.

Anyway, there we were chowing on reindeer meat and wishing there was more. Truth is, people have been eating this stuff for centuries and today it’s an expensive delicacy.

Roasts are hard to find in the U.S. but they’re out there, so ask your local butcher what he can scrooge up—what he can scrounge up—and have a tasty if truly tasteless Christmas.