This is exactly what it looked like: as if someone had hacked off a foot, boiled it, and dressed it in a little white boot. It was like finding something from Dexter in my soup pot.

How I ended up making tongue for dinner is a roundabout story. What I really wanted was to try out this adorable sounding Fergus Henderson recipe for crispy pig tails. And I figured, in my neighborhood, with its preponderance of funny animal bits, I would definitely be able to find them somewhere. So I walked to the carniceria on the corner and asked for pig tails. The butcher laughed at me. And I thought – really? – because I’m staring at a pig’s head next to a goat’s head, right above bins of offal and piles of trotter. And he laughs at me for wanting pig tails?

So he gives me the address of a few more carnicerias in Bushwick and I begin a trek into the hoods of Brooklyn looking for pig tails. No luck. One butcher didn’t even know what part of the animal I was talking about, and we played an embarrassing game of charades trying to determine just what the tail of a pig was. I drew curlicues in the air. Despondent and luckless, I hopped on the train to Union Square to see what the early Spring Greenmarket had to offer. Not much yet, a few root vegetables and hardy winter greens. But I did find some beautiful broccoli rabe and a jar of silky creamed honey, some Jerusalem artichokes and a perfectly round, perfectly yellow squash. No pig tails.

Having given up on the pig tails (for now, just for now), I took the train back home to Brooklyn and walked back into the carniceria on my corner. “I’m back,” I said, and the butcher, a young guy from Mexico, not much older than myself, shook his head at me. » Continue reading this post...