The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [135]
I also needed some chocolate for the dessert I had in mind. Fortunately the state of Virginia produces no chocolate to speak of, so I was free to go for the good Belgian stuff, panglessly. In fact, even the most fervent eat-local types say it’s okay for a “foodshed” (a term for a regional food chain, meant to liken it to a watershed) to trade for goods it can’t produce locally—coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate—a practice that predates the globalization of our food chain by a few thousand years. (Whew…)
During the week I’d given some thought to what I should make; the farm’s varied offerings certainly gave me plenty of choices. Working backward, I knew I wanted to make a dessert that would prominently feature Polyface eggs, having heard so much from the chefs about their magical properties. A chocolate soufflé, since it calls for a certain degree of magic, seemed the obvious choice. For a side dish, sweet corn was a no-brainer; there’d be kids at the table and no one had tasted corn yet this summer. But what meat to serve? Because it was only June, Polyface had no fresh beef or pork or turkey; Joel wouldn’t begin slaughtering beeves and turkeys till later in the summer, hogs not till the fall. There was frozen beef and pork in the walk-in, last season’s, but I preferred to make something fresh. Rabbit seemed risky; I had no idea whether Mark and Liz liked it, and the chances that their boys would eat bunny were slim. So that had left chicken, the animal with which I’d been most intimate this week. Which, truth to tell, left me feeling vaguely queasy. Was I going to be able to enjoy eating chicken so soon after my stint in the processing shed and gut-composting pile?
That queasiness perhaps explains the multistep preparation I finally settled on. When I got to Mark and Liz’s house, there were still several hours before dinner, which meant there was enough time for me to brine the chicken. So I cut each of the two birds into eight pieces and immersed them in a bath consisting of water, kosher salt, sugar, a bay leaf, a splash of soy sauce, a garlic clove, and a small handful of peppercorns and coriander seeds. My plan was to slow roast the chicken pieces on a wood fire, and brining—which causes meat to absorb moisture and breaks down the proteins that can toughen it on the grill—would keep the chicken from drying out.
But the brining (like the carving of the birds into pieces) promised to do something else, too, something for me as much as the meat: It would put a little distance between the meal and Wednesday’s kill, certain aromas of which were still lodged in my nostrils. One of the reasons we cook meat (besides making it tastier and easier to digest) is to civilize, or sublimate, what is at bottom a fairly brutal transaction between animals. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture. For these particular chickens, which I had personally helped to kill and eviscerate, the brining would make a start on that transformation even before the cooking fire was lit. Both literally and metaphorically, a saltwater bath cleanses meat, which perhaps explains why the kosher laws—one culture’s way of coming to terms with the killing and eating of animals—insist on the salting of meat.
After a few hours, I removed and rinsed the chicken pieces, and then spread them out to dry