Literally. Watch the movie.
Janet Bonney recounts giving CPR to her chicken, on a PBS Special.
Chicken, in all its forms and styles, has gone from being ubiquitous in my life to being something a bit more important lately, and I don’t just attribute that to the wacky chicken-kissing, Jackie Onassis sound-alike at the start of the film clip, above. For one thing, I have these great neighbors down the street who took an old, ramshackle farmhouse and made it gorgeously spare and fresh; for reasons that I don’t yet know, they recently bought some chickens. And for several weekends in a row, Sherry and Mark were outside, building the little buggers a fabulous, fox-proof coop. We went to visit them all a little while ago, and actually carried the chickens from one part of the yard to another, before the coop was finished. The chicken I held (which was no longer a chick but not yet a chicken, and slightly gangly in the way that a hormonal pre-teen might be) didn’t peck at me; it just looked at me, eye to eye. I think. It’s hard to tell with chickens.
I’ve never understood why, but I’ve always had an affinity for chickens, and this one was no different. For some reason, chickens like me. When I was a kid, someone taught me how to bock Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” in chicken; I still automatically do it to this day whenever I see one, and they always respond positively. When I was an editor at Clarkson Potter, P. Allen Smith and his associate Betsy Lyman named one of their prize heritage-breed chickens after me, and after an editorial disagreement I stopped hearing about it and got a little worried.
But the one I met at Sherry and Mark’s was now officially a neighbor, so I held it close; maybe it was the beat of my heart, or the fact that I was having an early hot flash, but it seemed to be very cozy and comfortable and in no particular hurry to head back to the house. When I put it down, it just pecked around happily in its little enclosed space like it was on chicken uppers, and all I could think of was the Chicken Lady in Kids in the Hall: Gravel and grubs. Gravel and grubs. Gravel and grubs.
Like most people who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I’ve eaten a lot of chicken. My grandmother, who was the daughter of a kosher butcher, made a roast chicken pretty much every Friday night of my childhood, and I spent years eating skinless boneless chicken breasts that had all the culinary allure of a piece of balsa wood. I ate KFC, chicken from Popeye’s, McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, and Southern Fried Chicken from the now-defunct Cookie’s Steakhouse on Huntington Long Island. It was only when I went away to college and actually bought a Perdue chicken to cook from scratch that I noticed it was yellow. Bright, day-glo yellow, and big. Very big. I thought that was normal until I went to cooking school, and all we ever used were Bell & Evans birds, which were white and small, and I thought I was being gipped.
Chicken is cheap. Very, very cheap. Think of the popularity of Buffalo chicken wings, and the fact that you can buy them by the 50 pack for under $10. To get it cheap and to keep it cheap, it has to be produced in mass quantities. We “process” billions of birds every year in this country in order to keep the price down, and theoretically, to fulfill the laws of supply and demand. The more they buy, the law says, the more you have to produce, and you have to do it faster, more cheaply, and more consistently. Hence antibiotics, growth stimulants, and corn–a lot of corn. Which, of course, is what makes cheap chicken bright yellow.
A few weeks ago, Susan and I went to visit my cousins down in the D.C. area; we made dinner for them one night, and eschewing their local supermarket, which sells chickens from the meat case that are marked ALL NATURAL but which otherwise have no identifying information, we went down the road to the shamelessly expensive Whole Foods. We bought a local bird from a local farm. It was $17, which just about made me fall over. But I knew that it would feed four people for dinner that night, and that my cousins would likely have leftovers for two more meals (they did). Furthermore, I also knew that it probably spent its days outside, like the chicken getting CPR in the film above: Gravel and grubs. Gravel and grubs. Gravel and grubs. So it was okay. Mostly.
It’s hard to choose between heart and wallet, habit and practicality. I’ll always eat chicken, most likely, and I’ll always be watching my dollars. I’ll just eat far, far less of it than I have in the past; and when I do buy one for a lot more than the $.99 a pound variety in the meat case, it will hopefully have had a nice, chicken-y life with a lady like Janet Bonney from Harpswell, Maine; and that it had an easy death. And that’s worth the price, if I must eat it at all.
Sunday Night Roast Chicken
Serves 4
Some of you might wince at the idea of following this post with a chicken recipe, but I think it’s appropriate; this is the dish we make when we want to really slow down. We eat it infrequently but when we do, we roast it carefully, eat early in the evening, and savor every bite.
Technique adapted from Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
kosher salt, black pepper
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced into thick pieces
a large bunch of fresh tarragon
1 4 pound, free range chicken, of the best quality you can find
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
2. Remove the chicken from its wrapper and let the bird come to room temperature. Sprinkle it all over with salt and black pepper, inside and out, top and bottom. Stuff the bird under the skin with the garlic cloves and as much tarragon as you like (stuff it into the cavity as well). At this point, you can refrigerate the bird, uncovered, overnight for spectacular taste. Just let it come to room temperature again before roasting it.
3. Place 1 tablespoon of grapeseed oil in a large, cast iron skillet. Put the chicken in the pan, breast-side up, and roast for 20 minutes. Remove, rotate it onto its breast, and continue to roast for 20 minutes. Remove and rotate it again, so that it’s breast-side up. Continue to roast for another 20 minutes.
4. Remove to a platter, cover loosely with foil, and let it rest for 15 minutes before carving.
We drink this with a nice, inexpensive bottle of Gruner Veltliner, and all is right with the world.
