Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [44]
We took Arlene back to the house and I dunked him in scalding water, holding him by his chalk-green feet. When I pulled him out, he smelled like wet cat. Plucking is no harder than shucking corn and the feathers came off in fistfuls. (I did not save them to make earrings and dream catchers or stuff pillows, but some people do.) After slicing open the body and scooping out the innards, I possessed a fowl that sort of resembled the birds at the supermarket.
Novella Carpenter devotes much of her wonderful book Farm City to her adventures raising and slaughtering livestock in the inner city and approvingly quotes Carla Emery, author of The Encyclopedia of Country Living: “I don’t think much of people who say they like to eat meat but go ‘ick’ at the sight of a bleeding animal. Doing our own killing, cleanly and humanely, reminds us of our interdependence with other species.”
I didn’t go “ick.” On the other hand, I didn’t feel especially humble as I contemplated the dressed carcass. I’ve eaten a lot of chickens in my life, and they were all dead. There was no epiphany in store for me, no deepening sense of interconnectedness. There are good people who might need to kill a chicken to understand the link between a living bird and a McNugget, but apparently I had grasped and accepted the concept from the get-go. It was good to know this.
The next day I made chicken and rice soup. My children, who knew exactly what was in the pot, to my surprise ate with gusto. “We’re honoring Arlene by not wasting her,” said Owen. They must teach this in school; I never talk that way. I, on the other hand, could not stop thinking about bugs. I could not look at the meat without thinking about centipedes squirming out from under a brick and Arlene nabbing them. There’s a downside to knowing where your food came from.
The very same day that Arlene lost her head, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story quoting K. Ruby Blume, the founder of an organization called the Institute of Urban Homesteading. “The level of appreciation for nature and life when you slaughter your own meat creates a kind of ethic that I think is what we need to save the world,” Blume said. “That’s why I do this—I want to live with a deep gratefulness and appreciation for what the world provides for me.”
Don’t we all.
CHICKEN
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
Hassle: Time-consuming and grisly
Cost comparison: Arlene, cleaned and plucked, ended up costing about $2.00 per pound. You can buy a roasting chicken at Safeway for just about that much, and minus the gore. If a factory bird is what you’re measuring against, we got rooked. Obviously, though, the Safeway chicken is a piteous and debeaked fowl who never saw daylight and subsisted on antibiotics. A better comparison is a pastured bird from an organic farm, which around here runs $4.79 per pound. And by that yardstick, raising your own meat would seem a good idea. Alas, our backyard chicken was bony and sinewy with stringy, chocolate-colored flesh. You could argue that we have been ruined for “real” chicken by fleecy white supermarket hens. Maybe so. But hard to reverse.
CHICKEN AND RICE SOUP
This is Greek avgolemono—chicken and rice, spiked with lemon and enriched with egg. This soup is truly good food. Campbell’s is only okay.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Few soups are easier.
Cost comparison: To make this soup costs $0.62 per cup. Campbell’s condensed chicken soup with rice: $0.66 per cup.
One 3- to 4-pound chicken (preferably not killed and cleaned by you)
1 onion, peeled and cut in half
Kosher salt
1 cup rice, long grain or short
2 large eggs
Juice of 2 big lemons—plus more, if desired
Freshly ground black pepper
1. In a large pot, cover the chicken and onion with water and bring to a boil. Skim off any foam with a slotted spoon. Add 1 tablespoon salt and simmer, partly covered, for 2 hours, until the meat is sliding off the bones. Add more water if it seems to boil away too rapidly.
2. Remove the pot from the heat and strain the