Sabrina squints at herself in the mirror, dread in her eyes. She hears snipping, sweeping, Smash Mouth, Shakira. Her eyeglasses are off, and she’s having trouble focusing. This is making her nervous. She’s paying $200, and should be eating lunch. The stylist lifts the scissors. Inches she’s known since high school fall to the floor. She starts to stammer. He puts a hand to her shoulder. “Tell me what’s wrong. Use words.”

She leaves the salon. She stops at the Greek diner on Madison to grab something to eat at her desk. She chooses the club sandwich. When she opens the bag, it’s four inches thick, an architectural creation with bacon dangling, mayo oozing, turkey sprawling, tomato slices glistening beneath the fluorescent light. She could dismantle it, but do you take apart a Gaudí, or Renzo Piano? She looks at it pensively, and then uses a napkin to wipe off her lipstick.

There is a meeting at three. Eight of them sitting around the conference table, with the whiteboard on one wall and the color markers that smell like banana and papaya. Nothing gets done, because they all start to laugh. She takes a deep breath. “I just hope no one here is laughing at my haircut,” she pouts. She’s gratified that her hair is still long enough to twirl on her tongue.

It’s true her afternoon vice is frozen yogurt. When she answers the phone, the cord sweeps across her desk, dripping creamy raspberry across the fourth drafts of contracts, and she knows the best way to solve the problem is by licking it off. As long as no one is looking. And even if someone is looking.

At six o’clock, on the way home, she listens to her iPod on the subway and starts to sing. Put it in my mouth. She said put it in her mouth… She looks around nervously, and then lowers her voice.

In the kitchen, before dinner, she reaches into the refrigerator and opens a bottle of wine. Then she pours the Riesling into two glasses. Just a hint of honey and spice.

We clink them together and bring them to our mouths, drinking. Maybe there’s some peach and pear in there, too. If you devour the breast, you can floss with the bra strap. I kiss her. I love her.

I’m going to be a dentist.

© 2010 James Sturz. Photo © 2009 nyki_m. All rights reserved.

Last October, Sonja Profanter stood smiling in the crisp Alpine air, her cheeks as shiny and round as the local apples. Six foot tall in her socks, she was easily dwarfed by the jagged Dolomite peaks behind her. But the massif to her side was another story: it was about eight feet tall, and made of speck. Some 150 lightly salted and smoked hams had been carved into 1,276 pink and white marbled rectangular chunks, and Sonja was beaming at the gleaming majesty of Speck Mountain while sporting her new tiara. Just minutes before, the 26-year-old clarinetist and skiing- and hiking-enthusiast had been named Speckköningin, or the new speck queen.

Like its towering cliffs of rock and glistening crags of pork, Italy’s South Tyrol is a Land of Contrasts. Wedged up against the Austrian border like an apple slice inside a strudel, this area was Austria-Hungary before falling to Italy in 1919. For the next 20 years, Mussolini did his best to Italianize it. Even today, every town and stream has two names: one in Italian and one in German. Of the Südtirol’s half-million people, some 28 percent speak Italian as their first language and call the area Alto Adige, but to hear ruddy, blond-haired Italians in their best lederhosen and dirndls sing the praises of their beloved speck is as much a spectacle of the local pride.

On the broad stage of the 2008 sixth-annual Speckfest in Santa Maddalena (St. Magdalena) in Val di Funes (Vilnöss), Herr Doktor Franz Mitterrutzner, director of the Südtiroler Speck Consortium, congratulated Sonja and then told the assembled crowds: “Thousands of people here make speck in their houses, and we defend ourselves against any imitators. We tell them that speck comes exclusively from the South Tyrol! And we say this especially to our Italian friends, who might be lovers of prosciutto di Parma or San Daniele!”

Indeed, if the South Tyrol has one heraldic emblem — besides its 400 castles — speck is it. All cured hams are not the same, and the Speckköningin and Speckgeschäftsführer (Dr. Mitterrutzner in his formal position as consortium director) want to assure you this. In northern and central Europe, ham is smoked long and hard with highly resinous wood; that’s what gives Germany’s Black Forest ham its smoky taste. In southern Europe, preserved meats are salted instead, and you can taste that saltiness in every bite of prosciutto or jamón serrano. But speck is an amalgam of the two curing methods, just as you’d expect in a place where Campari-sipping bobsledders have names like Guglielmo Scheibmeier, Gerda Weissensteiner and Günther Huber.

While genuine speck is Italian, few Italian ham legs can escape their destiny of becoming prosciutto. So speck hams today are outsourced through Europe, mostly from Austria, Germany, Holland, and Denmark (compared to prosciutto hams, speck hams are leaner). In the South Tyrol, speck-making dates back at least as far as the 13th century, with recipes and techniques passed down by father to son, although there’s nothing quite so paternal today as the regulatory codes of the European Union.

Speck starts as a lean boned haunch, branded with its place of origin and first production date. Next, those legs are hand-rubbed with salt and spice (spices differ from maker to maker, but generally include secret ratios of juniper berries, pepper, pimiento, laurel and rosemary). For three weeks, the hams are turned periodically as they absorb their spices, before being moved into a smoking room. But unlike the smoky-flavored northern and central European hams, South Tyrolean speck is smoked using low-resin woods like beech, in rooms kept below 68 degrees, where plenty of cool fresh air is drawn inside (air just like what circulated in Santa Maddalena at the Speckfest, although minus the oompahs and toots of the very able brass band).

Then aging starts. While a thin layer of mold forms on the surface of the hams — Speckgeschäftsführer Mitterrutzner further clarifies that speck is the only raw ham in the world in which mold is part of the production process, but humbly asks you to forget this while eating — the speck ages for 22 weeks in cool, humid rooms, where it loses more than a third of its weight. Then the mold is washed off, a five-person team comes to inspect the hams, and brands the legs four times more to show they’re ready to swallow up. Your typical speck leg weighs 10 pounds at the end of the process, and about 2.2 million of them are made in the South Tyrol each year. The real McCoy is South Tyrolean Speck PGI, or Speck Alto Adige IGP (for “indicazione geografica protetta”). The rest is 100-percent ersatz.

“Arnold Schwarzenegger’s home region produces speck,” Dr. Mitterrutzner likes to say, “but it’s smokier since they’re in Austria.”

When you taste speck, there’s an immediate absence of heavy salt or smoke, a delicate porkishness and sweetness fused with a bottom layer of creamy fat. Unlike prosciutto, you can cut speck just with a knife, into cubes, slices, or little sticks. But you can also shave it with an electric slicer, and never have to worry about motor-wrecking, shrapnel-spraying bone. Similarly, Dr. Mitterrutzner wants you to know that speck’s a valuable source for protein, iron, calcium and various vitamins B. But that’s not the point.

The point is standing before Speck Mountain at Speckfest, in what also happens to be the oldest German-speaking winemaking area in the world (the indigenous Rhaetians, who still speak Ladin, were the first to store wine in wooden barrels ringed with iron hoops, instead of using animal skins or amphorae). The point is drinking the local wine — or beer, or grappa, or fresh apple cider — and applauding the new Speckköningin, who now stands flanked by Miss Südtirol and Hans Mantinger (a.k.a. “Glacier Hans,” who wears glacier glasses wherever he goes and is revered in the South Tyrol for the virtuosity he brings to cutting speck, especially when an accordionist plays by his side), and the omnipresent Dr. Franz Mitterrutzner, who wants speck appreciated on an international level, and whose own lederhosen looks so smart it could have been tailored by Ferragamo. The point is standing amid the throngs in October, with a speck panino in your stomach — unless you’ve opted for the Tyrolean gnocchi sprinkled with speck, or speck bread dumplings, or simple roast potatoes with slices of speck — and taking a deep breath of Alpine air and looking past the hubbub at the silent Dolomites, which assume a rose-hued tint at the end of the day, and then thinking: I’ve got to get some of this speck into my pockets, I’ve got to get little cubes of it into the toes of my socks, or slices into my jacket’s lining, I’ve got to shave it thin and wrap my bare skin with glistening speck until I’m a mummy, like 5,300-year-old Ötzi the Iceman, who was found in the South Tyrol in 1991 and now looks like a humanoid slab of speck, himself. The point is thinking all this as the brass band plays its incantatory anthems, Sonja Profanter thanks you with her ready smile before a rustling South Tyrolean flag, until speck is the only thing on your mind, and on your palate, until you feel yourself emerging from the throngs and onto the stage, because you realize, finally, there is no Speck King.

Danke, danke, grazie, you say between bites.

——

If the seventh-annual Speckfest in Val di Funes (Vilnöss) in October 2009 seems impossibly far away, consider a warm-up visit to the 12th-annual Speckfest in the South Tyrolean capital, Bolzano (Bozen), in May. Visit speck.org or suedtirol.info for more information.

© 2009 James Sturz. All rights reserved.

Listen to James read this essay

A man in Wyoming calls his lover in New York. It’s been 11 days since he has seen her, and it feels long and terrible because their relationship is new. “It’s midnight here,” he says, “so I know I must be waking you. But I have to tell you about my dinner. Are you there? This is important.” He cradles the receiver to his cheek, sitting on the hotel bed with his socked feet rubbing against carpet. “We went to dinner, and I need you to know about the prime rib I ate. It was swimming in a gully of juice. I mean, sopping and red, and…” He catches his breath now, recalling the bites and the texture, the moments of flesh. “It could only make me think of you,” he tells her. “I was the only one at the table without boots or a cowboy hat,” he starts laughing. “I was supposed to be talking about raising capital, and about getting it into Cheyenne fast. But I was thinking of you between each swallow, and all I could think of was your body.”

Featured in

The woman in New York says, “God, I miss you lots. Hurry here; hurry home. It’s two o’clock in the morning, and now I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

“Then I shouldn’t have told you.”

“I’m glad you did.”

He says into the receiver: “You make me hungry. I’m hungry now.” He’s wide-awake.

“Say more,” she says to him, suddenly.

He has a handful of bedspread drawn into his fist. “I want to hunt you. Inside your clothes.”

There is the smell: steak, grilled over charcoal, colluding with a breeze, while dribbles of sizzle impregnate the air. And there is the taste: the seared, tender flesh, trickling mouthfuls of juice at each bite. Like monkeys, we are omnivores. We have been eating meat since we first discovered we could – since the first Homo erectus realized that killing for food made the stomach feel good. In the days when there were many gods, and many of them were wild and choleric, we sacrificed animals to them, and sometimes we even sacrificed ourselves.

Meat is about celebration. It’s alimentary sex. Tristan Tzara, the great Dada poet, said in 1920 after a performance: “For the first time in the history of the world, people threw at us not only eggs, vegetables and pennies, but beefsteaks as well. It was a very huge success.” The fiction and food writer Bob Shacochis recalls an anecdote about his girlfriend, the formerly vegetarian Miss F., whose doctor diagnosed her as severely anemic and prescribed liver pills with enough iron to turn her into an I-beam. “She left his office and made a beeline for Safeway, where she purchased two pounds of the antidote in its nonpharmaceutical form,” Shacochis writes.

It’s only an observation that people in health food stores often look sick. It is an indisputable truth that kissing a woman after a meal of steak and red wine is different from kissing her after you eat tofu. It is better.

The man in Wyoming, on the twelfth day of his trip, says to his lover, “Grow your stomach big for me. Make it round and full. We’ll age you nine months.” He gets off the phone, and then calls her back immediately. “I have this fantasy of you as a milk cow.” She says, “I like that.”

The humanivorous shark swimming off the Florida coast has the right idea: Don’t waste time with herring or carp. Follow the scent of sirloin in salt water.

A woman on a second date surprises her companion by kissing him back with twice the ferocity. She is ravishing. She says, ravenously: “If I bite off your tongue, I’m not going to return it.”

I am a flesh-eater. I have eaten Bambi, Chicken Little, Fernando el Feroz. I have watched slabs of steers hang in New York’s Meatpacking District, dripping their essences down to the brick street. I have read the story of cannibals (human flesh is one of the finest sources of protein, experts tell us), devouring their prey with ritualized table manners and special wood forks. A half-century before Dahmer, the essayist M.F.K. Fisher suggested that the best human beef would come from adolescents raised in the countryside on apples and creamy milk. For well-behaved cannibals, including Micronesian princes and kings, fillets from the ball of the thumb were once considered unparalleled delicacies.

A friend says that the reason people eat Gummi Bears is they have the same consistency as earlobes. I believe him.

I have left marks with my teeth on others’ bodies and I have felt teeth biting down on my own skin, and I have liked it. Sometimes, I have craved it.

The mother looks at her four-year-old son, still bundled in layers of baby fat. She presses a finger into the soft flesh of his tummy, and watches it spring back into shape. “I could eat you alive!” she coos, and the boy breaks into giggles. He’s nine years away from his first junior high school hickey.

Who dares tell me the rump is a cheap cut of meat? Filet mignon is what you do with a lover. Hamburgers are for something lustful and quick, when you’re short on patience and badly needing relief. I am ready for vegetarians to send hate mail, to tell me that you can’t justifiably martyr an animal in the name of passion. But I am ready to tell them I can live comfortably with the guilt. It’s a guilt I want.

“Full-bloodedness is the raison d’être of steak,” argues the French semiotician Roland Barthes. In his country, if you want your steak rare, you order it saignant or bleu. You ask for it wounded and bloody. To make steak tartare, you double its animality: You take raw meat, and then you beat in a raw egg.

The diner at Smith & Wollensky looks at his dish, points to the tenderloin on his plate, and says savagely, “Hey, it was either him or me.”

At a Fourth of July barbecue, an analyst wipes sauce from his chin, and says, innocently, “Yeah, it may have been a steer, but how do I know it was a nice steer, a simpatico steer?”

I asked the woman I was seeing, “Do you want to join me for eating meat?” (The syntax was awkward, but it was exactly what I meant.) My brother-in-law, the chef, offered a recipe. I bought the best piece of beef I could find. It was all tied up, bound by cotton strings. First, I seasoned with salt and pepper. Then I seared the edges of the filet mignon in a pan. I put it into the oven at 375°F, just a half-inch from the bottom, and we waited for a half-hour to pass. When we pulled it out, steam eased from the surface. Black peppers were nestled there like freckles or birthmarks. Dimples in the meat had flooded with juice. “What do you think?” I asked. “It looks luscious. I want to eat it,” my own Miss K. said, not mincing words. She cut into the loin delicately, then stabbed with the prongs. Once inside her mouth, she chewed the flesh like a lioness.

I want vegetarians to explain to me how I didn’t enjoy this.

Three days later, the lover returns from Wyoming. He goes to her apartment, with two weeks’ worth of fantasies about her body. They sit, cross-legged in the living room, on the shag rug. He kisses her and their teeth clink. She has a freckle on her lip that he wants to chew off. She says, nervously, “I used to bite my nails and eat my cuticles. I wonder how many pounds of my skin I’ve swallowed since I was a little girl – because I don’t think I ever spit it out.”

He’s looking right at her, almost laughing. He sighs, “I’ve really missed you.”

She has a scar on her calf that he traces back and forth with his fingers. The skin is stretched smooth like a sail.

He tells her, “You’re the good cholesterol inside my arteries.”

She says, with her head leaning against his chest, “And now I’m making your heart work twice as fast.”

If you saw the way her neck poured into her shoulders, you wouldn’t need to ask why he bites.

© 2007 James Sturz. All rights reserved.

read by James Sturz
recorded live on January 18, 2007

Novelist, essayist, and food writer James Sturz reads his sensual and occasionally erotic piece about the pleasures of flesh—both animal and human—and the sometimes disquieting similarity between them.