Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Page 7

  By the time I am gathering a lame and terribly-pecked chicken from the pen on my dad’s property, readying it and myself for its slaughter, it’s become clear that a full summer of country air has done nothing for my outlook. I’ve been out of school for almost a full year, aimlessly putting a paycheck together in a hodgepodge of strange ways—I cleaned the rooms of a charming and historic bed and breakfast, cooked hamburger patties and turkey club sandwiches at a local public golf course canteen, and picked up as many waitress shifts as I could get at my friendly old spawning ground, Mother’s on Main Street. The earth and sun have somehow revolved around each other so many times that, again, it’s already getting dark by five o’clock and I am not one gibbous closer to a life plan. I live in the cold basement apartment of my dad’s house.

  That fall, I was often outside in my canvas jacket sitting on the log pile at dusk smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, feeling shrouded in gloom. I watched the garden decay, and a frost settle, and thought about death and the inherent beauty of the cycle of life. How untragic it would be, I thought, if I just killed the mailman or maybe myself, and returned to the earth. I was reading Dostoyevsky—who arranges the timing of these things?—and identified too strongly with Raskolnikov’s desire to have all feelings, all sensations, and to kill a human being. I had it confused at the time with some literary context but I think, in hindsight, I was just brittle with subcutaneous rage, and bone tired. I had been hustling for a long time. Eternal sleep had strong appeal. I’ve all but begged to kill this chicken.

  There was no need for me to be killing chickens. This wasn’t 1930 or anything. And we weren’t out on the Nebraska plains. We were in what had been my grandparents’ house, up on the hill overlooking Lambertville, on the Jersey side of the Delaware, where my dad had been living since he’d sold the ruins. The house looked over a cemetery and had a deep woods behind it. It’s true that my dad didn’t have TV—the “tivvies” as he calls them—a telephone or a microwave—but these were aesthetic choices. There were people on either side of us—normal New Jersey neighbors—who knew of things like ice-in-the-door-of-the-fridge, MTV, and instant ramen noodles. He kept chickens as part of his gestalt.

  There was one chicken in the coop being badly henpecked. My dad said we should kill the chicken and spare it the slow torture by its pen mates. I said I’d like to kill it. I said I wanted to kill it. I said it was important to confront the death of the animal you had the privilege of eating. I said it was cowardly to buy cellophane-wrapped packages of boneless, skinless breasts at the grocery store—desensitized, sanitized, devoid of any semblance of its live form.

  This was what two years at Hampshire College had done to me.

  My father, wishing I would comb my hair more often and pass quickly through this particular phase, said, “You can kill the thing when I get home from work.”

  He claimed to have grown up with chickens and said he had killed many in his boyhood, so I let him coach me through it.

  From a remote spot on the back kitchen steps, he told me how to decisively gather the chicken out of the pen. Adding my own bit, I spoke to it philosophically about the cycle of life. I held it firmly and calmly with what I hoped was a soothing authority. Then he told me to take it by the legs and hold it upside down. The chicken protested from deep inside its throat, close to the heart, a violent, vehement, full-bodied cluck. The crowing was almost an afterthought. To get it to stop, my dad told me to start swinging it in full arm circles. I windmilled that bird around and around the way I had spun lettuce as a kid in the front yard, sending droplets of water out onto the gravel and pachysandra from the old-fashioned wire basket spinner my mom used.

  He said this would disorient the bird—make it so dizzy that it couldn’t move—and that’s when I should lay it down on the block and chop its head off, with one succinct whack. If you’re as practiced as my father claims to have been, your ten-year-old brother windmills the birds while you are chopping off their heads, and no sooner have you tossed one chicken into the grass to run around headless, than your brother is handing you another dazed chicken to whack, and like a machine you just spin and whack, spin and whack, until you’ve got twenty birds ready for the icebox for the next five winter months of Sunday suppers.

  In my own way, not like a machine at all, I laid it down on a tree stump and while it was listless and trying to recover, I clutched the hatchet and came down on its neck. This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. The bird started to orient. I was still holding its feet with one hand and trying to cut its head off with the dull hatchet with my other when both the chicken and my father became quite lucid, and not a little agitated. The chicken began to thrash about as if chastising me for my false promises of a merciful death and a poignant logic to his demise at my hand. My dad yelled, “Kill it! Kill it! Aw, Gabs, kill the fucking thing!” from his bloodless perch up on the landing of the kitchen steps.

  I kept coming down on the bird’s throat—which was now broken but still issuing terrible clucks of revolt and protest—stroke after miserable stroke, until I finally got its head off. I was blubbering through clenched teeth. My dad was animated with disgust at his dropout daughter—so morose, so unfeminine, with the tips of her braids dyed aquamarine, and unable even to kill a chicken properly. As I released the bird, finally, and it ran around and around the yard, bloody and ragged but at least now silent, he shouted, “You weren’t fair to the damned thing!” which I heard as, “What kind of person are you?”

  For a solid minute, and for a significant distance, the headless chicken ran around in the yard before its nerves gave out, spent themselves, and it fell over motionless in some dead brown leaves. This sight is pretty arresting but I was familiar with it as I had been to the Kutztown County Fair many times as a child where Mennonites and other rural Pennsylvania agricultural folks convened to sell scrapple, souse, double-yolk eggs, and funnel cakes. Bearded, suspendered guys at the fair butcher live chickens and let them run around in the pen with their heads cut off before wrapping them in butcher paper for you to take home.

  The other chickens in their pen, now silhouetted against the darkening sky, retreated inside to roost for the night. My dad closed the kitchen door and turned on the oven.

  It’s quite something to go bare-handed up through an animal’s ass and dislodge its warm guts. Startling, the first time, how fragilely they are attached.

  I have since put countless suckling pigs—pink, with blue, querying eyes—the same weight and size of a pet beagle—into slow ovens to roast overnight so that their skin crisps and their still-forming bones melt into the meat, making it succulent and sticky. I have butchered two-hundred-twenty-pound sides of beef down to their primal cuts, carved the tongues out of the heads of goats, fastened whole baby lambs with crooked sets of teeth onto green ash spits and set them by the foursome over hot coals, and boned out the loins and legs of whole rabbits that—even skinned—still look exactly like bunnies. But at the time of the chicken killing, I was still young and unaccustomed.

  I retrieved the bird off the frozen ground and tied its feet and hung it from a low tree branch so it could bleed out. Then I went inside and boiled a blue enamel lobster pot full of water. Once the bird bled out, I submerged it in boiling water to loosen its feathers. Sitting out on the back steps in the yellow pool of light from the kitchen window, I plucked the feathers off the chicken, two and three at a time. When I finished, it was reduced in size in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Its viscera came out with an easy tug; a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the dark yard.

  There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive and learn how to kill a chicken. I’m not sure you should sit across from each other and eat the roasted bird in resentful silence either, but we did that too, and the meat, as if scripted, was disagreeably tough.


  Bones

  6

  I’D LIKE TO JUMP AHEAD. MELISSA AND I IN OUR SEPARATE HOMES, hers with her husband and two daughters in a white clapboard near our hometown in New Jersey, mine with my gorgeous androgynous girlfriend in an East Village one-bedroom tenement apartment. Melissa leaves me that phone message, “Bwahahhahahahaha!!!” about the bone density study. That era.

  I’ve graduated from college on my third try.

  Stopped stealing things.

  Don’t want to kill anybody or anything anymore.

  I’ve been working in the most unsavory corner of the food industry, except for maybe poultry processing, which is to say, for the past ten years I’ve been a grunt putting together a living as a freelancer in New York City catering kitchens. For the last several of those grim catering years, I cooked every July and August at a children’s summer camp in western Massachusetts.

  If you didn’t know it was there and you weren’t hunting for it, you would easily miss the camp’s gravel road, which twisted down from the highway, cut through the woods, and eventually opened up into meadow. At the bottom of this road was a hundred-year-old slate-shingled barn that had since been converted, gently, into the bunks and dining hall and theater space of the children’s camp. Up at the top of the wide sloping meadow, butting up to the tree line, were a few A-frame houses for the administrative and senior counselor staff and a miniature, one-room faded-shingle Cape Codder cottage—for me, the camp cook—from which you could look out upon the entire campus below and Mt. Monadnock in the distance and the jet green forest for miles between.

  While the cottage was only a single ten-foot-by-ten-foot room, it had paned windows on all four sides that made everything look watery and seemed to erase the boundary between outdoors and indoors. It had a tiny porch with a step down into the tall grass, which was just big enough for two people to sit smoking a cigarette without burning each other, but barely. In back, there was a fenced-in spot where I hung my towel to dry when I returned from the communal showers across the way, and in that miniature yard I always planted, for the summertime, outdoorsy hell of it, a few rows of cosmos. When the dew on the windows in the early mornings was so thick that it trickled like rain, I often felt as if I were sleeping outdoors, on one of the longest and best camping trips ever taken.

  Every year, I arrived a few days before camp officially started, when the grass was still waist-high from the year’s growth and the land was utterly still save for the wildlife. I spent those days down in the huge camp kitchen in what used to be the dairy barn, unpacking all the cooking pans and pots that we had so carefully washed and put away the year before at the end of August, and found all the cutlery and plates and cereal bowls and ran everything, anew, through the dishwasher. In silence, except for the kitchen radio, I swept out the chipmunk and field mouse droppings from the screened-in dry-goods room and made lists, and plugged in the kitchen phone, and scrubbed down all the counters until the place was ready to prepare food for, at first, the dozen or so counselors, and then right behind them, the one hundred campers of the first session.

  With my teeth chattering uncontrollably from the deep chill of the early morning—it got cold in those hills in the summertime!—I tugged on my pants and heavy sweatshirt and readied myself to go down to the barn and finish preparing the kitchen. A most unnatural and frenetic rustling of the grasses just a few feet away beyond my tiny front porch sent a rocket of alarm up my spine. I froze, immediately and intuitively terrified.

  One woman, utterly alone, in the middle of a woods, out of earshot.

  I ducked down low—adrenaline coursing through my veins as I quickly calculated exactly how alone I was with no bodega, taxi cab, or pedestrian nearby—and silently but quickly stepped into my rubber boots. Fully dressed, I spider-walked to the backmost wall of the cottage and stood back up slowly so I could peer out the window without being seen by whoever was crawling through the tall grass. In those few seconds of involuntary adrenaline rush, I imagined, with total clarity, the derelict who had walked down from the highway, ventured along our gravel road, and was now creeping up to my cabin to torture me at knifepoint for the next four solitary days and nights. Attracted by my car parked beside the cottage, a signal to him of potential prey, I imagined vividly how he walked past the uninhabited A-frames, ignoring them, and was now down on all fours, obscured by the tall grass, creeping up to my flimsy screen door.

  I saw his stringy hair, his greasy sort of goatee, his dirty army surplus jacket, his jeans hanging off his thin frame, his partially unlaced sand-colored boots and his two socks, both white but one with green stripes and the other with orange.

  And in an instant, there in front of my porch waddled a wild turkey as big as a Labrador. And behind it, one after another after another, came sixteen more.

  I watched this procession in silent awe, my body deflating like an unplugged swimming pool mattress, and counted seventeen wild turkeys with prehistoric-looking heads, as they waddled their way through the tall grass covered in heavy dew and made their way down the long sloping meadow.

  The work at camp was in an airy, wide-open kitchen with a view of camp life from every screened window: horses in a paddock; “Birch” girls—the eight-year-olds—in flip-flops with their towels around their necks stomping down the hill to the pool; the “Willow” boys—twelve-year-olds—playing soccer just beyond the arts barn with about as much form and finesse as a kitten chasing a cotton toy at the end of a wire held by a slightly mean human. Wherever the ball went, they all went. The bunks were separated by age and gender and named after trees, from Birch to Spruce to Willow. It was such a welcome departure from the kitchens I had worked in all fall, all winter, all spring—all my life really—with its wide-planked wooden floors and wooden cabinets and the jubilant purply mural of happy children painted on the wall.

  I felt like a severe arthritic—hunched and limping to Lourdes and miraculously standing upright, freed from joint pain—to be in a place where the pine-scented breeze swept through the afternoon prep shift, and the fireflies snuck in after dinner when the campers left the screen door open, and where early early in the mornings while I made coffee and turned on the ovens I would catch chipmunks, cheeks bulging, trying to make off with granola bars and loaves of sliced bread.

  The catering kitchen where I had clocked most of my hours that season, where I had just been days before, was in a warehouse on the West Side Highway. I put together my paycheck among two or three of the highest-volume catering companies in the city, and they were all eerily the same. During the off-seasons, these operations kept a skeleton crew of a few cooks, dishers, and drivers to handle little dinner parties for publishing executives and Wall Streeters, but in-season—fall, holidays, spring, and that season unto its own: wedding—these kitchens teemed with freelance mercenary cooks who possessed few skills and fewer scruples, and I worked side by side with them for more than a decade. We moved around from kitchen to kitchen, wherever the work was, got paid triple what restaurant work paid, and managed our flexible schedules by simply not booking in for any days we needed off.

  In composite, as an entire organism, we had the skills to pull off what was required—there would be someone on the crew who could produce by day’s end an elaborate miraculous bûche du noël, studded with little perfect meringue mushrooms, and another who could brilliantly organize a plate-out for 350 that would saturate the banquet room in perfectly hot dinners on clean-rimmed plates in less than fourteen minutes start to finish, and perhaps another who really did have a feel for meat cooking and who might come in early and preseason the birds or the loins even though no one asked her or paid her to do so. But the bulk of what was served to party-going New Yorkers was ground out in a robot coupe—rosemary aioli, harissa hummus, white bean puree—by a revolving and ever-interchangeable warm body in a rented chef coat who knew not one thing about what a homemade mayonnaise might be. You would never be fired for throwing a cup of sour cream and a little walnut oil into
your breaking aioli because you didn’t know a thing, just like a hundred catering hackers before and a hundred after you, about the relationship of raw garlic to egg yolk and blended oil, but even if you were, there was always another right behind you to take your place.

  These windowless kitchens, all of them, were lit with harsh fluorescents, and when you entered at seven a.m. and didn’t exit until two a.m. sometimes, having prepped all day and then gone out to chef the party at the museum or the gallery or the private home—I’ve done a shift that long easily a hundred times—you looked tubercular—by the time you clocked out.

  The debris that accumulated in those kitchens—sneakers, hoodies, but also food left over from jobs—sat in the walk-in for weeks until an energetic and anal-retentive cook with a little hustle and who happened to still give a shit, tossed it. She spent a quick hour, her jacket on over her chef’s whites, inside the huge refrigerated walk-in tossing clear plastic quart and pint containers labeled with masking tape and black Sharpie into the garbage. The containers had names of places, not names of foods—the places where they had been on that day’s dizzying roster of multiple events leaving the warehouse kitchen in six different vans at about the same time. BOTANICAL. MONH. LIBRARY.