There is a very specific kind of madness that takes over a person when they believe they have discovered the best version of something. I first experienced this madness in 1991, when I was nine years old and my grandmother made Barbacoa for the first time in my presence. I was sitting at her kitchen table, which was the kind of table that had lived through forty years of family dinners and looked it. Crayon marks under the edge, a water ring that had been there since before I was born, one leg that wobbled unless you put a folded paper towel under it. I remember the smell before I remember anything else. It hit me the moment I walked through the door: something rich and deep and complicated, the kind of smell that rearranges your understanding of what food can be. I stood in the doorway for a moment, probably with my mouth open, while Grandma Rose moved around the kitchen with the practiced efficiency of someone who had made this dish so many times that her hands knew what to do without being asked. She didn't look at the stove. She didn't look at a recipe. She was telling me something about school while her hands worked, completely independently, like a separate organism that happened to share her body.
There was a period of approximately three months in 1991 when I was completely obsessed with perfecting Barbacoa. I made it seven times. My roommates ate it seven times, with declining enthusiasm that they were too polite to express directly but that I could track in the increasingly creative excuses they found to not be home at dinner. By the fourth attempt, I had isolated the main variables. By the sixth, I had produced something genuinely close to what I was trying to achieve. The seventh attempt, and I say this without false modesty, was excellent. It was the best version I had ever made. I know this because on the night I made it, I was alone. My roommates were at a concert they had not invited me to, which in retrospect I understand. The excellent version of Barbacoa was eaten alone, in a quiet apartment, and it was perfect and nobody saw it.
Here is the problem with Barbacoa: once you have eaten a truly excellent version, you cannot eat a mediocre version without grief. The mediocre version isn't bad. It's perfectly fine. It will nourish you and taste like what it is. But you will eat it while holding, somewhere in the back of your mind, the memory of the excellent version, and the excellent version will make the mediocre version feel like a translation, technically accurate, missing the music. This is a curse and also a gift, because it means you are always, on some level, looking.
I realize I've been writing for quite a while now and have not given you a single measurement, temperature, or instruction. I want to acknowledge this directly rather than just ending the essay as if this were intentional all along, even though I am now ending the essay as if this were intentional all along. The recipe exists. I have it, or most of it, or something that gets close to it with the right conditions and the right mood and the right phase of the moon. I will add it to this page. I say this in full sincerity and with no ability to give you a timeline. Please bookmark this and return periodically. The story will get you through in the meantime.