Kibbe: To Grind or not to Grind

I thought the butcher might actually hit me.

“You are the customer and I will do what you want, but this –THIS — is NOT kibbe!” he yelled over the counter. Then he kissed his fingers at me, which I’m pretty sure is the Lebanese version of giving someone the finger.

Every holiday in my house starts with kibbe: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. Doesn’t matter. The Middle Eastern lamb tartare is something we hover around the kitchen waiting for. When I was a kid, my Sittau would hand me a fork and let me make swirls and patterns on the cold, firm meat, which gave like clay under a modeling knife. As a teenager, she taught me to make it myself, gently kneading grated onion, soaked burghul and ample salt into the ice cold meat. She insisted on ice water to aid the kneading and I discovered that the best kibbe came from meat that was still slightly frozen. My hand would grow numb and turn bright red from working the icy mass, but everyone said mine was the only kibbe that tasted just like Sittau’s.

It was the butcher who undid it all. Sittau and the grandmothers of her generation would have their butchers trim every scrap of fat from a leg of lamb and then grind it twice. ONLY twice. This joker wanted to grind it five times. I had let him do this on a previous visit and the result was an unappetizing mush. This time, I wanted it my way. But when he handed it to me it was studded with big white globules of fat. And then the revelation: he was using a fattier piece of meat and grinding it more to assimilate all the fat. It would be easy to think that the butcher was just a con man, using lousy meat. But all the kibbe I’d seen in restaurants was the same as his — a soft, pasty mush. This butcher and the restaurant owners were all two generations removed from Sittau’s. So the only possible conclusion was that tastes must have changed back in the Middle East.

In the end, I got my kibbe the way I wanted it. But I still don’t know why this butcher and his bretheren prefer it their way.

And I also had to find a new butcher. Because I’m pretty sure that guy’s got my picture on the wall, right next to the grinder.