Langue de Boeuf

I should have taken my mother's advice, but how many of us ever really do? "Be yourself. If they don't think that's good enough, then who needs 'em?" And yes, I knew it was true. But love makes us do strange things. I love my fiancé, and my fiancé loves his parents. And so it was that I attempted to win the love of my future in-laws - my worldly, internationalistic future in-laws - with a dinner whose main dish my small-town American tongue couldn't even pronounce. If only I could manage to avoid actually saying the words, and successfully conceal that I was trying this from the simplest-looking recipe I was able to print off of the internet, I might actually live through this evening. But first, the cooking.

Langue de Boeuf. It's possible that the cow whose tongue now lay like an overlarge slug on my kitchen counter could have had an easier time at the French words, despite having already been butchered. It was much larger than I'd expected, and exactly as slimy. After unwrapping it from the white paper and seemingly endless layers of clingy clear plastic, and getting the unfamiliar meat-juice on me, I washed my hands. I washed my hands for a long time; I was stalling and I knew it. I didn't want to look at the thing. What was it about the French and their need to eat the most unappetizing parts of things?

When I turned the faucet off I heard a jingling sound behind me, and turned to see Riva trotting into the kitchen, her tail high and her whiskers twitching. She paused at the counter directly under the raw langue and sniffed, then meowed a plaintive request that suggested that she, at least, sympathized with the French's tastes.

"I'm 'fraid not, kitty," I said. "That there slobber-glop is too expensive to waste on someone who lives on catfood." Riva made it clear she wasn't going to settle for no, looking up at me with luminous green cat-eyes full of hunger, meowing again.

I crossed the kitchen and retrieved a can of catfood from the top shelf, making the mistake of turning my back. There was a moment when I realized the absence of Riva's fur rubbing against my calf as I usually felt it when I picked up a can, and I knew something was up. Too late, I turned back around to see that Riva had jumped onto the counter and was helping herself to the slobber-glop that I had just paid so much for the privilege of cooking.

"No! Bad kitty!" I was about to come down on the cat with the only thing I could think to grab in that instant, which turned out to be a banana, but she snatched the langue in her toothy jaws and leaped down, dragging it along the dusty, hairy floor into the furthest corner under the dining table! "Crap! Crap!" I flailed off after her, swinging my ridiculous weapon and banging chairs aside trying to get at the little stinker, but a stubbed toe stopped my pursuit, and I found myself hopping on one foot, swearing some more, just as my fiancé entered the room.

"Hon! What's going on?" he said. I sputtered, gestured madly at the corner where Riva was enjoying our dinner, unable to articulate the events as they had unfolded in my frustration. He looked from me to the cat and back again, and a wicked smile spread over his face. "What's the matter?" he said, and for an instant I knew what he was going to say next. "Cat got your tongue?"