The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [32]
***
"Unfortunately, you can see with your fingertips as well as your eyes," Miss Toklas says. "Press here," she continues on anyway, showing me the precise point on the neck before quickly looking away. The pigeon squirms under my fingers, its blood pumping hard, pressing through.
"Harder! Bin, you are letting it suffer."
How does she know? I wonder.
With her face still turned the other way, Miss Toklas lowers her voice and rounds it out into a coax. "Steady yourself. Stop shaking. Keep pressing down. Harder, that is right, harder."
She sounds like my mother, I think. The words are different, but that mix of gentleness and urgent prodding is undeniably the same. After my mother stopped having babies of her own, she helped other women bring theirs into the world. I often heard her voice talking them through what their bodies were still reluctant to do. "Good job! The next one will be easier. Trust me. "
Without looking back, Miss Toklas walks out of the kitchen, leaving me with five more to kill. She had said "Trust me" at the beginning of our lesson as well. "If you cut off their necks, you will lose all the blood. Done this way, those birds will come out of the oven plumper and tastier than you can ever imagine. Exquisite!" Doubt must have never left my face because Miss Toklas again said "Trust me" before continuing on: "You will need, when dealing with a larger bird, to feed it a couple of spoonfuls of eau de vie, cognac, or a bit of sherry. In my experience, ducks prefer the taste of eau de vie the most. It improves their flavor immeasurably, and it also braces them for what is to come. It will make your task, Bin, easier in every way."
"You will need..." is how Miss Toklas begins all of her recipes. It is a prophecy that always comes true. "Exquisite!" is how her recipes end. While that may sound more like an assertion than a line of instruction, she means it to be just that: Now this! is what "exquisite" tastes like is what she wants me to learn. Miss Toklas does not believe that there is an innate ability in every one of God's creatures to recognize perfection. Assistance is sometimes required. She feels that this was especially true of the cooks who have preceded me at 27 rue de Fleurus. According to the concierge, there have been many. Assistance, Miss Toklas must have felt, was too often required with these now departed cooks. I can imagine, though, that many of them left of their own accord after Miss Toklas showed them her recipe for smothered pigeons. She insists upon the technique for the preparation of all the other varieties of birds that can be purchased live from the Paris markets. The difference in the end result, I must admit, is spectacular, but the required act is unforgivable.
I have cut many necks. That is not the problem. Even before I pulled the first one back, aiming for that slight curve that forces the down to part and the skin to peek through, I had already watched my mother put a blade to many a chicken's neck. She would never cut it clean off. Her reasoning, unlike Miss Toklas's, was economical. First, my mother would nick the skin until the blood flowed. If the knife was inserted deep enough, there is a red arc that falls neatly from the notch to the awaiting bowl. A hesitant pair of hands would cause trickling and sputtering, a final messy insult to a body already sacrificed. It would also mean less congealed blood for the soup that night. Hesitancy does not complement death or hunger. Miss Toklas agrees wholeheartedly that speed and decisiveness are required. She believes that it