The fresher the food, the better it tastes.
Right?
This maxim applies to a lot of foods. Shore lunch, restaurant lobster tanks, garden tomatoes and warm-from-the-oven brownies come to mind.
But not chicken.
Over a workmanlike dinner of sautéed chicken breast on a bed of quinoa pilaf with a side of steamed broccoli, my Beloved commented on the freshness of the chicken.
Frankly, he’s lucky when he gets chicken at all. I have a policy against bone-in chicken. I do not prepare bone-in-chicken. The thought of tackling those joints with a butcher knife makes me shudder.
The chicken wasn’t organic. It wasn’t free-range. It wasn’t grass-fed.
But it was boneless, skinless and purchased in bulk at Costco, where the chicken is injected with less water than the chicken at the super supermarket.
Like most suburbanites, we are far removed from the origins of our meal. Our neighbor once had a chicken, but I think that chicken was a pet, not dinner.
I do, however, know what it means to run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
You know how some early memories of momentous occasions are seared into your brain? One of my first memories is my hand on my mother’s belly when my little brother was kicking. From the inside out. Realizing an alien is alive inside your mother is a pretty momentous occasion.
So is a headless, wild chicken dancing around your driveway.
When I was 7 or 8, my town-dwelling parents butchered chickens in their garage.
My mother thought she could save some money by buying live chickens and butchering them herself. “I grew up on a farm and watched my dad kill them and my mother clean them, but I had never actually cleaned one,” she remembers now.
“But I bought 15 chickens. Live chickens. I thought, ‘I can do that.’”
My dad didn’t know she intended to buy live chickens, but he’s a little like my Beloved. He can do pretty much anything. Sometimes, there are swear words involved, but he can pull off complicated tasks like fixing hot rollers and installing crown molding. And butchering chickens.
So he brings them home in the trunk of the car. Fifteen chickens in a crate in the trunk. On a sweltering summer day in shadeless southern Minnesota.
And wouldn’t you know it? Besides courier duty, Dad’s not off the hook yet with Mom’s great money-saving idea. They’re a team after all. He had actually butchered chickens before, not just as an observer. He was the go-to butcher when he was a boy and my grandmother wanted chicken for dinner.
So Dad cut off the heads of Mom’s chickens.
That’s when I saw chickens run around like, well, chickens with their heads cut off. I don’t remember much after that. I assume I made myself scarce. But Mom remembers.
“It was so hot, maybe it was hotter than normal,” my mother remembers. “And we had to get this job done. Fifteen chickens seemed like 1,500 chickens before we got done.”
Nope, Dad’s not off duty yet. “Then I realized I had never plucked a chicken or drawn the insides out,” Mom says. “So he had to do that, too.”
I’m on the phone with Mom, and Dad is hearing the conversation. “You just reach in there and pull ‘em out!” Dad chimes in.
Yuck.
“After you remove the feathers, you still have pin feathers,” Mom says. “You have to singe off the pin feathers. If you ever smelled burning chicken feathers, that was worse than the garbage later. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.”
So my parents have the feathers and guts of 15 chickens to dispose of. One garbage bag isn’t enough, so they use two bags.
Still not enough.
Remember, it’s the middle of summer. It’s hot. And in suburbia, garbage gets picked up once a week. And it doesn’t get picked up the Day of the Chicken Massacre.
“Every fly in the country came to our garage,” Mom says. “Then every cat and dog in the neighborhood came to our garage.”
My parents were familiar with the garbage man, and they begged him to make a special stop to please come pick up their garbage early.
He did. Thank the Lord, the garbage was gone, and the freezer was full.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “You didn’t eat them right away? Fresh chicken?”
Turns out, there’s a downside to being familiar with the origin of your chicken.
“We froze ‘em!” Mom says. “Put ‘em in the freezer for later on. You have to understand, it is very difficult to eat that chicken for dinnertime when you just did that in the morning. So we didn’t eat those chickens right after we killed them. Later on, they tasted just fine, but the whole process, I never want to do it again.”
Skinless, boneless chicken breasts from Costco never sounded so good.
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Looks enormous, doesn’t it? It’s cracker bread, and it was filled with air. As instructed, I tapped on the top and was rewarded with crunchy shards of sesame-flecked dippers.
