The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [136]
While the chicken roasted slowly outside, I got to work in the kitchen preparing the soufflé with Willie, Mark and Liz’s twelve-year-old. While Willie melted the chocolate in a saucepan, I separated the eggs. The yolks were a gorgeous carroty shade of orange and they did seem to possess an unusual integrity; separating them from the whites was a cinch. After adding a pinch of salt, I began beating the egg whites; within minutes they turned from translucent to bright white and formed soft, rounded peaks, which is when Julia Child says to begin adding sugar, and to turn the beater on high. Now the egg whites rapidly doubled in volume, then doubled again, as billions of microscopic air pockets formed amid the stiffening egg proteins. When the heat of the oven caused these air pockets to expand, the soufflé would rise, assuming everything went according to plan. Once the egg whites formed a stiff, spiky snowscape, I stopped. Willie had already blended the yolks into his melted chocolate, so we now gently folded that thick syrup into my egg whites, then poured the airy, toast-colored mixture into a soufflé dish and put it aside. I could see why pastry chefs in Charlottesville swore by Polyface eggs: What Joel had called their “muscle tone” made baking with them a breeze.
Willie and I brought the corn out on the deck to shuck. The ears were so fresh that the husks squealed as you peeled them back. I mentioned to Willie that our entire meal would be a celebration of the chicken—not only the eponymous entrée, which we could smell sweetly roasting on the grill, but the soufflé with its half-dozen eggs, and even this corn, which I explained had grown in a deep bed of composted chicken manure. Probably not the sort of detail you’d want to mention on a menu, but Willie agreed there was something pretty neat about the alchemy involved, how a plant could transform chicken crap into something as sweet and tasty and golden as an ear of corn.
Golden Bantam, the corn in question, is an heirloom variety introduced in 1902, long before the hybridizers figured out how to amp up the sweetness in sweet corn. This momentous change in the genetics of our corn is an artifact of an industrial food chain, which demands that vegetables be able to endure a cross-country road trip after picking so that they might be available everywhere the year round. This was a particular problem for corn, the sugars of which begin turning to starch the moment it is picked. So in the early sixties the breeders figured out a way to breed in extra copies of the genes responsible for producing sugars. But something was lost in the translation from local to cosmopolitan corn: The kernels lost much of their creaminess, and the specific taste of corn was overwhelmed by a generic, one-dimensional sweetness. The needs of a long industrial food chain might justify such a trade-off, but when you can eat corn picked a few hours before dinner, there’s no reason for it. Unless of course an industrial diet of easy sugars has dulled your taste for the earthy sweetness of corn, now that it has to compete with things like soda.
I HAD MADE pretty much the same meal on several occasions at home, using the same basic foodstuffs, yet in certain invisible ways this wasn’t the same food at all. Apart from the high color of the egg yolks, these eggs looked pretty much like any other eggs, the chicken like chicken, but the fact that the animals in question had spent their lives outdoors on pastures rather than in a shed eating grain distinguished their flesh and eggs in important, measurable