The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [139]
While the corn finished roasting, I removed the chicken from the grill and set it aside to rest. A few minutes later I called everyone to the table. Ordinarily I might have felt a little funny serving as both dinner host and guest, but Mark and Liz are such close friends it seemed perfectly natural to be cooking for them in their home. That’s not to say I didn’t feel the cook’s customary preprandial apprehension, compounded in this instance by the fact that Liz herself is such a good cook, and holds very definite opinions about food. I certainly hadn’t forgotten the time she’d wrinkled her nose and pushed away a Polyface steak I’d served her. Grass-fed beef is flavored by the pastures it grows on, usually but not always for the best. It had tasted fine to me.
I passed the platters of chicken and corn and proposed a toast. I offered thanks first to my hosts-cum-guests, then to Joel Salatin and his family for growing the food before us (and for giving it to us), and then finally to the chickens, who in one way or another had provided just about everything we were about to eat. My secular version of grace, I suppose, acknowledging the various material and karmic debts incurred by this meal, debts which I felt more keenly than usual.
“At the beginning of the meal,” Brillat-Savarin writes in his chapter “On the Pleasures of the Table” in The Physiology of Taste, “each guest eats steadily, without speaking or paying attention to anything which may be said.” And so we did, aside from a few sublingual murmurs of satisfaction. I don’t mind saying the chicken was out of this world. The skin had turned the color of mahogany and the texture of parchment, almost like a Peking duck, and the meat itself was moist, dense, and almost shockingly flavorful. I could taste the brine and apple wood, of course, but also the chicken itself, which more than held its own against those strong flavors. This may not sound like much of a compliment, but to me the chicken smelled and tasted exactly like chicken. Liz voiced her approval in similar terms, pronouncing it a more chickeny chicken. Which is to say, I suppose, that it chimed with that capitalized idea of Chicken we hold in our heads but seldom taste anymore. So what accounted for it? The grass? The grubs? The exercise? I know what Joel would have said: When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens, too.
The flavors of everything else on the table had a similarly declarative quality: the roasted corn and lemony rocket salad, and even the peachy Viognier, all of them tasting almost flamboyantly themselves, their flavors forming a bright sequence of primary colors. There was nothing terribly subtle about this meal, but everything about it tasted completely in character.
Everyone was curious to hear about the farm, especially after tasting the food that had come off it. Matthew, who’s fifteen and currently a vegetarian (he confined himself to the corn), had many more questions about killing chickens than I thought it wise to answer at the dinner table. But I did talk about my week on the farm, about the Salatins and their animals. I explained the whole synergistic ballet of chickens and cows and pigs and grass, without getting into specifics about the manure and grubs and composted guts that made the whole dance work. Thankfully all of that, the killing cones, too, had retreated to the mental background for me, chased by the smoky-sweet aromas of the meal, which I found myself able to thoroughly enjoy.
The unexpectedly fine wine helped too, as did the fact that the dinner table conversation drifted off as it will do, from my Paris Hilton adventures as a farmhand to Willie