How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley

Author:Amy Finley [Finley, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-95243-1
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

THE INDISPUTABLE FACT THAT ROASTED CHICKEN tasted better at my grandma’s house than anywhere else in the world is how I first came to understand the mysterious concept of terroir. Grandma’s chicken tasted like her house: comfortable, comforting. That’s a bit of a bastardization, in that the real definition of terroir is that everything tastes uniquely of its place, but it got me there conceptually.

Grandma’s exquisite roasted chicken began as just an ordinary bird from the Piggly Wiggly, not the pampered and praised Bresse chicken, the flavor of which—a little gamy, a little sweet—is a factor of its fat, the marbled fat a factor of its life. During a Bresse chicken’s short life it grows muscled and hearty on a heartland diet of milk, corn, and wheat supplemented by the insects, seeds, and other tasty tidbits it scratches up roaming in grassy pastures. Satiated, Bresse chickens end their lives lolling about in a cozy wooden cage, unwinding after months of forage and plumping up on extra rations.

Grandma’s roasting method, designed to get maximum flavor from an otherwise unremarkable bird, is the one I still use today. You take the chicken and remove its giblets, neck, and gizzards, then blot it all over with a paper towel to remove the watery, red-running juices. Then you take softened butter and massage it all over the skin, caressing the chicken like a newborn after a bath. You sprinkle the skin liberally with salt and pepper. Then the chicken goes onto a roasting rack set inside of a large pan, and then the large pan goes into a searing-hot oven. You play approximately two hands of Old Maid before turning down the heat, and then you cook the chicken until the thighs wobble in their joints and a knife tip, thrust into the thick flesh just above the thigh bone, produces a gush of clear juices.

But to make Grandma’s chicken taste so comforting and comfortable, you also had to serve it up in a particular way: on colorful plastic plates accompanied by crisp-fried slivers of shoestring potatoes. And to allow the eaters to gorge themselves while watching The Muppet Show, or The Lawrence Welk Show, or an old Doris Day comedy. And finally, to lavish so much attention on them that they didn’t even for a minute think about any of the sorrows or anxieties in their young lives.

The Bresse birds, gifted from the start, need much less coercion to become the tender morsels on our plates. En route to the bathroom, I peek into the kitchen, standing just out of the way of the waitresses who move in and out in a constant, kinetic stream, bustling through the dining room with their tremendous trays loaded with heavy china plates of chicken and the terra-cotta dishes of sides, setting them down gracefully on the doily-topped tables as if they didn’t each weigh probably fifty pounds.

In the kitchen, the chickens had all been skillfully broken down, legs and thighs arranged carefully on one set of high-sided baking sheets, breasts on another.

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