Ribs

The average pig has 14 pairs of ribs for a total of 28; the average human has 12 pairs for a total of 24. Twin assemblages framing our chests.

I bought a rack of pork ribs from the local Ukrainian deli this week for around $14, rubbed them with a store-bought jerk paste, and refrigerated them overnight. The next afternoon, I wrapped them in foil, put them on a baking tray (meat side down) in a 300º oven for three hours, unwrapped them to brush with sweet chili sauce, placed them under the broiler for three minutes to caramelize, and plated them with blanched-and-broiled broccolini, white rice, pickled onions, crispy shallots, green onion, and salted cucumber.

Sometime during the three-hour bake, I remembered that pork is said to be the closest analogue for human flesh. I stuck out my chest and ran my fingers up and down my own ribs for a moment, thinking about the previous night when I’d held the rack of ribs up at length — a two-foot length — before applying jerk paste.

When I opened the foil packet and went to flip the ribs with my tongs, they fell off the bone, and I thought once again about the 24 bones fronting my lungs.

It was a luxuriously simple dinner. Each preparation took only a few minutes of active work; the oven prepared the ribs as the vinegar did the onion; the burner alchemized rice and water as the salt rub did the cucumber. All these processes came together on our plates as far more than the sum of their parts.

An Instagram Reel I saw last year left me stunned. In the frame, we sit across from a young man — a boy who can’t be older than 20 — sitting in a wooden booth at a barbecue restaurant, as evidenced by his meat-and-three plate. The meat is rib. The video is shot from his wife’s PoV. She asks for one of his ribs, and he laughs, “You already have one.”

Among the hashtags in the caption: #christianhumor and #iykyk.

Is there a cut of meat more viscerally evident of our own physicality than the rib? Maybe tongue, delicious lengua — but a cow’s tongue, when you see it whole behind the butcher’s glass, feels so foreign compared to the appendages flapping in your mouth or mine.

I’ve continued eating the leftover rib meat, the garlic-tinged broccolini, and the pickled onions for dinner throughout the week. On Monday, I roughly chopped a pile of the three and made fried rice, also featuring chopped carrot and bell pepper.

Tuesday and Wednesday, I traded rice for pasta: a cuttlefish ink spaccatelli of which half a box had been sitting in my pantry for months. I crisped the rib meat in a pan like carnitas, then added the broccolini, pickled onions, green onion, basil, the cooked pasta and a bit of its water, and some freshly grated parmesan.

Unctuous is the word.