The Wisdom of the Radish (24 page)

Most male chickens don't even get the chance at life: they're tossed by the hundreds into trashcans and left to suffocate. Male dairy cows, thin-boned and lightweight, aren't worth the feed to raise them into steers. They'll never have the steak-growing capacity of Anguses or Longhorns—stout breeds specifically developed for muscle mass. So male dairy cows are slaughtered young, and their anemic, weak flesh—which usually hasn't seen the light of day, much less an exercise yard—becomes veal parmigiana.

Emmett and I could choose to look the other way. We could sell our roosters to the local feed store, where someone less thin-skinned would pick them up for a few dollars and turn them into dinner. (Or worse—since there's a strong cockfighting culture in Sonoma County, the roosters could very well end up in the ring.) We could go on pretending that we were vegetarian, even though our desire for eggs—and our need to safeguard the hens who produced them—had signed
the death warrant for male chickens under our care. Hell, we could tell ourselves that the animals were going to be picked up by another farmer who desperately wanted to provide a safe, happy home for roosters.

Fuck that.

Emmett got out the hatchet. And I went to get the Buff Chanticleer.
^m

I've heard it argued that the way a creature lives doesn't matter. That when he's facing the hatchet, whether it's in a huge processing plant or at the hands of the farmer who raised him, he's still going to fight like hell. He's still going to die a miserable death, he's still going to suffer, he's still going to do everything in his power to cling to life.

Later I'd have roosters that struggled. But I'm telling you, the Buff Chanticleer's attitude was so accommodating that it caused me to wonder whether I had a reincarnated Zen master on my hands—one who had screwed up and was patiently waiting for death so he could have another shot at personhood again.

Normally roosters hate being held. I simply walked up to the Chanticleer and scooped him up, where he waited sweetly in my arms, more like a lapdog than the testosterone-filled rapscallion that he was.

Emmett and I spent fifteen minutes postponing the inevitable, during which time the rooster didn't let out so much as a peep. We laid him down on the stump over and over, pressed his head this way and that, trying to determine what position would grant the cleanest, quickest death. He patiently bore our ministrations until we felt certain we had the best shot at a one-swing death.

I held him, and Emmett—with stronger muscles and surer aim—swung the freshly sharpened hatchet home.

 

 

 

Yes, the bird continued to spasm and flap after the head had been severed from its body. Yes, there was blood. But there wasn't much of it, and within fifteen minutes—after a tenminute bleed-out period, a quick scald at 145 degrees F in a water bath, and some frantic feather plucking before the skin cooled down—we had something that didn't look like
a
chicken. Rather, it looked like chicken. Reaching this point was cause for celebration: the chicken was quite definitively dead, and stripped of the things (head, feathers) that made it look personable. We were no longer standing guiltily by a woodshed with a live bird and a hatchet, wondering whether one of the cyclists breezing by on the road would careen into a tree when he glanced up to see us hanging a flapping, headless chicken from the rafters. Now the chicken was not only dead, but also dead looking; no fingers were severed in the process, and the tears that were shed had since dried; no bicyclists came to harm, and as far as we knew, they had their eyes on the road and we were the only witnesses to the murder. Success, right?

Surely, we thought, the hard part was over. After this it should all be smooth sailing. Within minutes, we'd have an oven-ready bird, stuffed with halved lemons, garlic cloves, and rosemary sprigs, its supple skin rubbed with salt, pepper, and vegan butter, some sage leaves slid under the skin.

Ha.

Postpone that vision of a perfect oven-ready carcass for, oh, three more hours. In its place, picture two idiots with a blunt knife tentatively slicing into a bird's dead, naked ass. For
an hour. Then picture a certain city slicker (chosen because her hand was significantly smaller than the country boy's) sticking her fingers into the aforementioned bird's ass. For another hour—during which she repeatedly smells her hand, which smells exactly like concentrated chicken shit. Only then, in the third hour, would the actual organs be removed.

We moved tentatively through the chicken cutting and gutting process, terrified of rupturing the gallbladder or the lower intestine, a mistake that would result in spoiled meat. After such a traumatic process (for us, not to mention the bird), we didn't want the bird's death to be in vain.

So, to be sure the meat stayed edible, we spent the next three hours trying to
gently
cut into the bird's cavity and
delicately
remove its organs. None of the websites we referenced, some of which contained very detailed, graphic pictures of the process, deigned to mention that all of the organs were suspended in connective tissue that resembled in strength and texture those giant spiderwebs that nearly frustrate Frodo and his friends in their ring quest. None of them mentioned that if you touched the bird's lower intestine, even if that intestine wasn't ruptured and the meat hadn't been spoiled, your hands would smell like concentrated chicken shit. And that an extremely sharp knife wasn't just handy: it was necessary. Also, that a substantial amount of courage would be required to stick your hand blindly into the rooster's still-warm viscera, even if that rooster was a rapist. And that even more courage would be required to plunge in, grab a fistful of viscera, and yank. HARD. Perhaps this should be obvious, but I for one would have appreciated being told that there is no room for gentleness when it comes to evisceration.

In other complications, all of the websites we referenced detailed the processing of Cornish Cross chickens, a hybrid
bird specifically developed for meat production. Our handsome heritage fellow was nothing like these birds. Cornish Crosses are, as far as I'm concerned, not real chickens. They're Frankenchickens. I'd encountered them a few times, most notably at an Amish farm in upstate New York, where they seemed woefully out of place with the bonneted children and hand-sewn laundry flapping in the breeze. The birds I saw were, at the tender age of two months, ready for slaughter. Heritage birds don't really flesh out until six months or so: our Buff Chanticleer was eight months old at the time of his death, having been purchased as a chick from a local chicken fancier shortly after our fox tragedy. The Cornish Crosses did not race around the pasture, chasing insects, flying up into trees, and clambering on top of the hens like my rooster did; rather, they walked a few steps and then lurched into a sitting position, exhausted by the effort required to carry the weight of their own breasts. All in all, they seemed dull, pathetic, and somehow revolting—even in the ideal, sustainable “chicken tractor” model that the Amish farmers were using. While the chickens were free-range, they never got further than a few feet from the tractor, so the term didn't seem to mean much. (And by the way, even the free-range, organic chickens from Whole Foods are Cornish Crosses.) These weren't chickens: these were pre-meats that happened to eat and breathe.

By contrast, our rooster was a living, breathing entity that happened to become meat. His smaller breast and body cavity meant it was harder to stick a hand inside him to get the organs out. His age also meant that he possessed some things that the two-month-olds lacked. More on this later.

Some aspects of processing heritage birds and Cornish Crosses are the same. Like step one: removing the feet. With a knife tip inserted in the joint, they snap off easily. Swallowing
my disgust, I bucked up and processed the feet so that I could use them later to add richness to our chicken soup. I dipped them briefly in boiling water and then “pulled off the socks,” which is an entirely pleasant euphemism for an entirely unpleasant procedure. Starting at the ankle, I removed, in one multi-toed sheet, the scaly skin covering the foot. A couple of toenails popped off in the process. I pulled off the other two that didn't, and then repeated the process for the other foot. Both “sockless” feet went into the refrigerator

Step two: removing the oil gland. This was another simple, outside-the-body step that involved cutting off a fatty section of the triangular tail that was said to give an off-flavor to the meat. It took a few slices, but eventually I removed all of the yellow fat on the tail.

Now the bad news: Everything up until this point was the easy part. Next, it was time to blindly cut into the bird's bum without cutting into its large intestine (which obviously terminates right there). After poking at the bird with a dull knife for fifteen minutes, we finally made a tiny, finger-sized hole. Another forty-five minutes of additional hacking, and a circle large enough to accommodate a very small human hand exposed the bird's cavity, filled with a confusing mess of grayish organ blobs.

Emmett made a chivalrous first attempt at sticking his hand in the cavity, but couldn't squeeze in more than a few fingers—no way were his broad knuckles fitting past the narrow hips.

“I'll do it!” The way I said it made it sound like I was volunteering out of the kindness of my heart, although clearly I was the only option left. I seemed to have fooled Emmett, though: he acted surprised by my generous offer.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I acted offended by the question. “It's my rooster, isn't it?”

Brave face on, I plunged in ... to the warm, squishy, whatthe-fuck-am-I-doing-here land that comprises the innards of a chicken.

 

 

 

We'd been taking turns trying to disembowel the rooster for forty-five minutes. I was able to stretch the cavity a bit, making it large enough so that Emmett could just barely jam his hand in. At the moment, he was the one wrist-deep in bird guts.

“Just pull!”

“I can't, I think something's breaking.” He stared at the dead rooster, a look of concentration on his face, apparently trying something new with his fingers and the viscera. “It's all stuck in there, it won't budge.”

“Well, can't you just grab and pull?”

“I'm trying! There's no room for me to open my hand.”

“Obviously, people do this,” I said. “So we should be able to. Here, let me try again.”

I stuck my hand inside the bird—the slippery organs once again refused to be caught by my fingers—and wished for this to be over. We were getting snappy with each other, and even snappier when we thought about how many more roosters were still running around raping hens in the yard. (Twenty-one, to be exact.) We'd been at this for over two hours now—closer to three if you counted the catching, stressing, and killing part. At this rate, it would only take us seven nine-hour days to process all of our roosters.

My mind was elsewhere—counting chicken breeds and the number of roosters we'd need to keep—when suddenly I noticed that I was using my fingernails to slice through the
connective tissue and loosen the organs from the walls. Which was gross, but I seemed to be making progress.

Emmett went to open a window. The smell of dead chicken was really starting to get to me. “You know, I really think we've broken the fucking intestine,” I said. “It smells disgusting. How the hell are we supposed to eat this shit?” I pulled out my hand and thrust it in Emmett's nose. “Ugh, smell it.”

“Don't shove your nasty fingers in my face!” he said, swerving away.

“I'm just saying, I think it's too late for this rooster. I think we wrecked it.”

I pulled out my hands, walked over to the sink, ran painfully hot water over my fingers, and started scrubbing. Emmett reached into the rooster with a look of resolve that mirrored the look he had worn just before swinging the hatchet.

“Well, I may as well just yank everything out, then.”

“Don't break it! We might not have ruined it yet. Be careful, would you?”

From my vantage point, I couldn't be sure what was happening inside the rooster, but clearly I had loosened the jar lid. Emmett's face was impassive as, with one pull, he brought a mass of organs out. He spotted the bright green gallbladder and separated it from the pile. A second pull brought the last of it out—heart, lungs, gizzard.

The lungs, spongy and pink, seemed to come out whole—at least, I couldn't see anything missing from them. But our chicken-processing guides warned us that they'd left behind plenty of lung tissue jammed between the chicken's ribs and suctioned on to the chest wall like glue. Apparently those who regularly eviscerate chickens have a special tool for the removal
of lung tissue. Ever the resourceful vegetarians, we used a grapefruit spoon.

Once we scraped the lung tissue out with our serrated spoon, rinsed, and repeated, we were in a good place. The heart, gizzard (a muscular purse filled with dozens of tiny jewel-like stones), trachea, and lungs were removed. The dangerous bile-filled gallbladder was out, and the poop-filled intestine was loosened from the cavity and pulled safely outside the bird. To finish up, Emmett cut around the base of the intestine. “You realize what you're doing,” I told Emmett. “You're literally ripping it a new one.”

He didn't appreciate my humor, but after three hours of organ removal my soul screamed out for crass jokes and beer.

I had to fight the urge to whine, “Are we done?” The intestine and gallbladder were in a bucket ready to be thrown away. The rinsed heart, liver, and gizzard were in a Mason jar in the fridge with the feet. But just when we thought we'd finished, Emmett spotted another organ situated high inside the cavity—up in the chest, the part that the rooster sticks out proudly when he crows.