Favorite meat meal?

[dumpling]

What's the best meat you have ever eaten and why? Where?

[Mister_Cutlets]

Dumpling,

I don't think I could even begin to answer that question. I've been eating five square meals a day since the first Cleveland administration, and every one of them has brought me a distinct delight. In recent years, off the top of my head, I might consider as candidates:

-- lunch in Paris, 1987, epigram of lamb for the first time at Michel Rostang. The apotheosis of lamb.

-- a boiled chicken in the alps with the Scrapple King. Bought for $3 at a grocery on the side of the road, consumed by a mountain stream.

-- pecan ribs and mutton at Ben's BBQ in Austin, stumbled across after a disappointing visit to the Iron Works.

-- Leg of Mutton with Stalin and Beria at the latter's dacha in 1952.

-- A pennsylvania pork roast in which a whole hog was spitted and cooked inside chicken wire. At the end, the host cut the coop wire off the pig with some wirecutters and pulled it off, with pounds of crispy brown pork fat and flesh stuck to it. "Do something with this," he told me -- and I did!

-- Last month I was walking down Avenue B and a fresh direct truck dropped a bagged, unsliced Jewish rye onto the street. The men didn't notice, so I spirited it away like a character in a Victor Hugo novel and took it home. I had some thick american cheese and some good bacon, and I cut thick slices and made a great, not good, grilled cheese and bacon sandwich.

-- An alpenwurst I once had in the street in Prague.

-- A long, draining Grateful Dead concert during my college days, during which I didn't eat for ten hours under the influence of LSD, and then found myself famished and exhausted at 3 am, with my pockets full of money at White Castle.

I'm sorry. I can't even begin to think of my greatest meals....there are just too many of them...and my eye is ever fastened on the next one.

yours,

Mr. Cutlets