Grey's Journal:
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
``Excuse me?'' ``The organs. They might be inside.'' Once upon a time, Zornitsa decided that I was to cook a chicken. When I imagined what this entailed, it was a trip to the supermarket, the purchase of a golden-brown chicken, a quick spin in the microwave and bingo: chicken for dinner. I should have anticipated trouble, for Zornitsa has often complained about my idea of cooking. Once, while I was preparing a microwaveable dinner for myself, I made the mistake of asking her if she wanted me to cook some extra for her, and I received a small tirade: ``That is not cooking. That is heating up the food. Voop! Out of the can. Voop! Into the bowl. Voop! Into the microwave. `Look at me,' you say. `I'm cooking!' No, Mr Grey. It's the same when you put your clothes in the machine and say `I'm washing my clothes.' You aren't washing your clothes, Grey, the machine is washing your clothes.'' In the supermarket, it was not one of the golden chickens we bought, but a decapitated, plucked, pale-white chicken corpse. A corpse that might still have organs inside. I cut the string off the chicken legs and spread them, feeling like an uncomfortable gynecologist with his first patient. Inside it was like a miniature Jonah's whale. I remember watching a cartoon about the great whale in my Sunday School class. Whales, according to the church and this cartoon, have no internal structure, as evidenced when the Jonah struck a match and saw, not stomach or other digestive apparatus as one might expect, but a hollow chamber surrounded by ribs with the mouth at one end. The cartoon did not show what lay at the other end of the whale. This chicken was as hollow as that cartoon whale. Zornitsa's prediction of organs had, fortunately, proven false and I reported this to her. ``OK. Cut off the wings.'' ``Aren't we going to cook it whole?'' ``No, Grey. Cut off the wings.'' I grabbed a big knife and manipulated the chicken into place. Unwelcome, a few observations came into my mind. Cooked chickens feel like a single, solid piece -- not so uncooked chickens. I could feel, all too clearly, the muscles as distinct from the bones as distinct from the tendons. A chicken wing, I was particularly unhappy to discover, feels just like the arm of a new-born baby: pudgy and incapable of resistance. As an obvious reminder that this pale dead thing before me had once been fluffy and clucking, a single feather remained in the wing. I pulled it out and cringed. After a few minutes of ineffective sawing at the wing with my knife, Zornitsa interrupted. ``What are you doing? Just chop it off.'' I hesitated. Zornitsa took over, putting one hand on the chicken's body and with the other hand stretched the wing taught. In this position, the chicken looked as though it had been caught shoplifting in a Middle-Eastern nation and was about to have its limb cut off as punishment. ``Poor chicken,'' I said. ``I never hear you say `poor chicken' when you eat it. Now chop.'' I brought the knife down where it crunched against the bones, but didn't separate the wing. Zornitsa, seeing I was useless, twisted the arm off with a single motion and a loud squishing sound. The legs came off in the same manner before she stuck her hands deep inside the chicken's hollow torso and tore the thing in half, loudly cracking the spine. I did not fare well during this process and Zornitsa's compassionate response was, ``What are you? Some sort of wimpy woman? Making all these faces and saying `Oh, my God.' It's a chicken. It's for killing, chopping, cooking and eating.'' The wimpy comment rung true. I have almost no experience cooking food. If left on my own, I will eat only foods that come in a bowl and are eaten with a spoon, these being mostly cereal, rice and pasta. Baking a frozen pizza is a big day for me. As a kid, I never expressed any interest in the production of food. When my mother prepared dinner, I disappeared into my room until the final product was ready. I knew nothing of cooking except that which was obvious to my ears two floors away. I'd be reading a book and hear thud thud thud thud thud thud thud pause thud thud thud thud thud thud thud and wonder, `What is she doing down there?' But never enough to go downstairs and ask. Now, living with a woman determined to get me to understand the basics of cooking, I had to face what is required for the production of food and to see that it isn't always pretty. Before this day with the chicken, the only argument I accepted for vegetarianism was the thermodynamic one -- that it is more energy efficient to eat lower on the food chain. But now, looking at what once had been a live chicken, then reduced to a dead chicken, then dead chicken pieces, I found myself sympathizing with even the most annoying of vegetarians. Zornitsa placed the remnants of the chicken on the oven tray and went to work surrounding them with potato wedges and covering everything with spices and alcohol. An hour later, when it came out of the oven, I was mostly over the experience in the kitchen, but when Zornitsa offered me a wing, I felt I had to decline. The feeling of a baby arm still hung in my mind. ``There's just something a too psychologically unpleasant about the wing for me right now.'' She disregarded my feelings. ``It's not unpleasant,'' she said. ``It's delicious.'' And with that took a big bite. |
||
|
|
||
|
Leave a comment, send an email or join my mailing list. Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
||
|
|
| |
||||||
|
||||||