Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [43]
Food styling is not my forte, but I arranged the sashimi as artfully as I could. The idea, as described in Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art: “Five or six rectangular slices rest like fallen dominoes against a high bed of crisp shred-cut giant white radish.” Mine didn’t look like that but it looked okay and the slices of fish did have the “unmistakable bloom of freshness upon them.” Then I mixed some powdered wasabi with warm water and put it in glass custard cups. Our chopsticks were being used as gardening stakes at the time, so we had to eat with forks. This detracted.
“How do I know it’s not going to kill me?” Mark asked.
“You don’t,” I replied.
He sighed and began to eat. He quickly cleaned his plate. “Wow,” he said, maybe four minutes later. “This was excellent! All you need is some presentation, some pickled ginger, some chopsticks, and you’re set.”
I was still scrutinizing the tiny red capillaries that threaded through the dense pink-tinged fish flesh. They looked like varicose veins. I prodded the sashimi, which appeared not as a translucent and luxurious delicacy but as something that was very clearly cold and dead.
As with sex, a lot of eating is in the head, and some crucial piece of the seduction went missing for me with homemade sashimi. I know this is irrational, but someone else needs to cut up a fish for me. I ate the sashimi, but without relish. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from making sashimi, but it is not something I’ll eagerly do again. I feel the same way about steak tartare.
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
STEAK TARTARE
Steak tartare—finely minced raw beef served with various condiments—is a dish I ordered at restaurants. Then I made it at home, and something about chopping that bloody red meat and smooshing it with egg and capers and mustard and then sitting down with a fork took my appetite clean away.
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
CHAPTER 6
FROM BEAK TO TAIL
KILLING CHICKENS
Slaughtering one’s own meat has become a rite of passage for Americans who are serious about food, almost an imperative. “You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened, or you can look it in the eye and know it,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle before dispatching a turkey. “The more I’d learned about the food chain, the more obligated I felt to take a good hard look at all of its parts,” Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma as he prepared to annihilate some poultry. “It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, which I was then and still am, that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.”
No, it was not too much to ask. I entirely agreed.
I should have known that my least favorite chicken—big, rude, handsome Arlene—was a boy. Even as a chick, Arlene (Owen named him after Garfield’s girlfriend) was brawnier than the others, and for a while I thought she was just smarter. Then one morning, she proclaimed her manhood. The crowing of a rooster was a sound my neighborhood had not heard for decades, if ever, and there was no question from whose Clampett-like yard it emanated. Since roosters are illegal here, friends suggested that I take Arlene to some cute farm in the country, that I free him in the woods (to be vivisected by raccoons?), or that I return him to the feed store. I knew exactly what I was going to do. “I couldn’t butcher one of my pets,” a friend reproached. Neither could I. Semiferal Arlene, who swaggered around the yard snarfing up centipedes, was not a pet. Besides, you pay good money for free-range chicken. Why would you just throw it away?
So one afternoon, my father—who put himself through college working at a slaughterhouse—drove over to help with the job. None of us had laid hands on Arlene in weeks and he raced around the yard, squawking furiously, until after a chase, he was landed. A worthy foe, that bird. I held Arlene down on a stump and my father removed his head with a pair of gardening