How To Eat A Guitar
The guitar is best aged dry. If kept in a cool, humidity-controlled environment, it will acquire a dignified depth with practically no downsides. You can take it out for a few licks here or there and hardly notice the difference. I, like many home cooks, aged mine on an open rack, where it is more likely to get attention. A guitar will tolerate quite a bit of handling before becoming unpalatable, but one left out like that will be more prone to funk.
Guitars are generally sold whole. They are rarely eaten, as they are large and difficult to prepare and have a tough and grainy texture, but they are full of unusual flavors which complement other instruments beautifully. When foraging for guitars, take special care to identify the species of wood used, as not all are fit for eating. Rosewood and other exotic hardwoods can irritate the digestion even in small doses. Maple is wonderfully fragrant and safe to eat in quantity. Spruce is safe but can smell and taste quite astringent if not cooked and spiced properly.
At thirty years of age, this guitar is a rare vintage. Time has melted the lacquer into the wood. The years have taken their toll. There is a long scar along the neck on a long diagonal, proof of past injury. The spruce top is pocked with cracks and dings, and the sound hole worn is raw and clogged with dust. Some things cannot be fixed, but a gentle scrub at least leaves everything clean.
All hardware is typically removed during preparation, but a nimble-toothed diner may enjoy picking over the knobs and frets. The strings must be left on or the tension and texture of the dish will be off. These strings are prepared by Martin in an 80/20 ratio, steel wire wrapped in burnished bronze and softened through use. Strings age differently than the rest of the guitar. For the first few days they are tinny, almost tannic. Once they settle in they are at their best for a few weeks. After that they begin to dull, less appealing to eye and palate. The high strings are thin and bare, fit to make your gums bleed if you aren’t careful, but the lower strings are fatter and chewier. It takes a long hot boil to soften them, and some might prefer a braise, but I find they are best had when rare. They are tougher to manage, but every note is clear.
The guitar is best cooked whole in a simmering braise. The neck especially calls for a low and slow heat. It is invariably less fragrant than the hardwood top, and its flavor is blander. Some prefer to debone the nut and saddle before serving, but these parts are so easily removed they may as well be left to the diner, and leaving them during the braise helps marry the flavors together. The truss rod, on the other hand, is a tremendous nuisance, being difficult to remove, harder to digest, and lending a metallic flavor to the surrounding neck. If you’re going to the trouble of taking the truss rod out, you may find yourself with a real mess of a neck, twisted or even fractured, unfit for plating. In such cases it is still good for a stew, and the fingerboard can often still be preserved separately.
When carving a guitar, it’s important to cut across the grain. The long, thin strips are tough and brittle, even when steamed or boiled at length, and cutting across the grain results in a better texture. Ripping strips along the grain makes an acceptable cut for slow cooking, as for a brisket or a stew, but is an acquired taste. Larger cuts can be palatable but only if tenderized.
This one has been beaten tender. The frets have been loaded with the grime and sweat of countless chords, scrubbed, clogged again, left to sit, over and over for most of the years I’ve been alive. Unlike most of what I eat, I know this guitar intimately. It has no name, but doesn’t need one. I chipped its head by accident when I hoisted it over my shoulder like an animal on a spit, a boy in high school, turning too quickly in a house I didn’t know. I paid to fix it. I accidentally broke its neck the same way years later. When I left my wife, it was the first thing I reached out to touch. Whenever I was lonely it sang for me, wordless and full, making room for me to feel everything in the world.
I didn’t leave it in the right conditions. It hung on the rack, open to the breeze of a cracked sliding door through rain and shine, swelling and shrinking with the seasons. A case would protect it, but I would never touch it. I knew it was better for me to see it. That when the moment came I would need to hold it again. And it did not quite rot, did not quite ferment, never split. It accepted crude surgery when I drilled out the base for a pickup, giving it a permanent EKG for speakers to throw, a clanky overclear sound I no longer use because it feels false.
Its real sound needs to be beat out of it, its chest made to rattle full and dark. It must be beat like the rattle will shake off the varnish and dissolve the cartilage of animal glues, skin the top and crack the ribs to find in the empty space a chunk of my own heart beating, held taut in a steam-bent body in hopes even one stranger will press their ear to it and give me the look of knowing, hearing there the truth of an urgent song: I am starving and I do not know what I need to eat.
With every strike of the pick I chew away at the neckhole, like a dog with a bully stick. The world hurts less when you have something tough between your teeth, something that can take it. Every other animal I ate was younger than me, but this patient box is my contemporary, birthed when I was. We made it this far. Two empty shaking chests, chewing on each other, straining our joints.
All these preparations for one more show. A potluck. I carve it up to share. I have only ever played hoping someone else will feel what I feel. Now I eat and watch others eat and wonder, was their stomach empty like mine?
Is it now full?
