Thankful for the Chicken

My summer home with Ada, regardless of the time I've not spent writing my dissertation, has seen at least one of my skills improve. Given that Michele normally comes home at least somewhat, if not very tired, and that she just wants to hold and feed Ada anyway, dinner has become my responsibility. So I've perfected my barbecuing skills, really learned how to cook both pork and beef roasts, and basically focused on all the little things that make a complete, nourishing, healthy, and interesting meal.

Last Friday I pulled out our Betty Crocker cookbook, a gift given to Michele by her grandmother, and flipped through the "Soups" section. But a few things about this cookbook. It looks about fifty years old, its target audience is definitely the female "homemaker" of the 1950s, and its sexism is so quaint its now funny. For example, in the opening section called "Kitchen Know How," the advice reads: "Every morning before breakfast, comb hair, apply makeup and a dash of cologne. Does wonders for your morale and your family's, too! Think pleasant thoughts while working and a chore will become a 'labor of love.'" Hey, I'm all for combing hair and the occasional dash of cologne, but not even Ada wants to see me in makeup.

But Betty's book's datedness is also its strength. Its comprehensiveness challenges the idea behind the more contemporary cookbooks, which are now almost exclusively specialized. The Betty Crocker cookbook does not promote a certain "lifestyle"; it assumes a certain unanimity among its audience, and its recipes are thoroughly mid-century American: by that I mean that any reference to foreign methods or ingredients--and there are many--are subsumed into a uniform blandness.

And yet there are so many great recipes. I decided on the Mulligatawny, a thick, curry-flavored soup that mixes some fairly incongruous ingredients: onion, carrot, apple, celery, chicken, green pepper, cloves, mace, curry and consomme. I even made the consomme myself earlier in the day. I cooked a chicken, harvested all the meat and made about 10 quarts of broth, most of which I froze and will use later.

I felt like I was enacting a cliche (which is probably true) about the relationship Native Americans had with the animals they hunted. They respected them by not wasting them. For some reason it felt better that I was getting so much out of just one chicken. Enough meat for two meals, and enough consomme for probably three different soups. I've thought about vegetarianism before, but I do not have the will to surrender the pleasure of tasty meats. It would be a serious sacrifice that I'm just not willing to make.

What does feel good is that I know that this particular chicken was not wasted. It reminded me of Marx and one of his many astute critiques of capitalism--that it separates product from the worker, and the manufacturing process from the consumer, which in turn results in the illusion that goods appear magically, out of nowhere. By emphasizing ends, and not means, this process encourages a free-floating consumerism which is disastrous for its cancelling of origins. There's always more where that came from, is the idea.

And yet it seems that we're slowly figuring out that this kind of mentality is not sustainable. At least some of us are. Animals, obviously, are not morally equivalent to humans. Otherwise, I would not eat them. But that does not mean that the human/animal relationship need be devoid of morality altogether. While some may see hypocrisy in this position, I think there's a clear difference between animals we raise for our own consumption, and wild animals we hunt merely for our pleasure. I don't understand people who hunt cougars or bears or other mammals that, if they're not on the endangered list already, will be soon. I think that livestock, when treated "humanely" (isn't there even some irony in using this word?) serve a moral purpose, and might even claim more usefulness than many humans, since at least they provide sustenance to other beings.

The chicken we ate gave his life so that three people could eat several meals. While I don't think I'll ever become a vegetarian, I was thankful for the chicken. I respected him by eating all of him, and by culling, even from his carcass, the flavors that will enliven meals to come.