First, Kill Your Chicken

There I knelt, hatchet in one hand and a living, breathing chicken in the other. I held it by its feet, and its head lay across the chopping block. It didn't cluck, didn't flap. It was calm — certainly calmer than I. My heart thumped; my stomach somersaulted into nausea. As I raised the hatchet, I thought, "I can't do this. I can't kill this chicken."

Then I took another breath.

And I remembered that as anxious as I was, this situation was of my own doing. I had asked to slaughter this animal — and only partly so that I would get the rare chance to write "like a chicken with its head cut off," and mean it.

When my sister and her fiancé announced almost ten years ago that they were going to start raising chickens at their home in Maine — for both eggs and meat — I immediately knew I wanted in.

My reasons? This was years before Michael Pollan immortalized the ideas in The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I thought that I should be capable of killing a chicken, as a culinary student at the time and as a meat eater who didn't want to be hypocritical. Plus, I had become increasingly distrustful of the food industry; I wanted to know more about the origins of the food going into my body.

When I mentioned my plans for chicken execution, most people quickly recalled a grandmother or great-aunt who could do the deed with a simple flick of the wrist. In the same breath, though, they said, "Not me. Somebody else can do it."

A place like Mayflower Poultry near Boston, then, with its famous "Live Poultry, Fresh Killed" sign, made such folks gulp. More and more, it makes me hungry. I haven't seen the whole operation, but the chickens are tasty, the storefront is nice and clean, and in one spotless room visible from the street, I've seen workers dressed in all white, wearing plastic gloves as they cut up chickens.

A far cry from what Diane Sawyer saw when she used the term "fecal soup" on 20/20 some years earlier, in a show on chicken-processing plants, which drove me to experiment with vegetarianism (unsuccessfully). She was talking about one of the processing-plant baths, in which chickens whose intestines had been accidentally ruptured by machinery were "washed" in the same water with cleaner ones — probably infecting them all with salmonella.

These days, of course, you can get high-quality chickens more easily. Farmers markets sell delicious birds raised with access to the outdoors and with feeds free of hormones and other additives as do natural-food stores. I like to believe that such companies' production methods are more sanitary than at the giant firms Sawyer was talking about.

But my sister and her fiancé, Peter, decided they wanted more control than merely driving 45 minutes to a fancy market. I didn't blame them, and I wanted to join them, at least for a weekend here and there. So when my sister asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I said, "A chicken. One of yours. But only if you let me kill it."

So on my birthday, behind a shed at their house, I took the situation into my own hands. And despite the nausea, the second thoughts, and the pounding heart, I took a deep breath and let the hatchet fall. The chicken went from calm to frantic, from alive to dead, from lying on the chopping block to running around — indeed, like a chicken with its head cut off. Exactly.

After the quick plucking and cleaning, we let the meat rest in the fridge. Then we stuffed the bird with lemon and garlic and roasted it. We tossed our homegrown Brussels sprouts and chard in butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese; roasted potatoes and tomatoes in olive oil, the former doused in rosemary and the latter in garlic; and baked butternut squash in a mint vinaigrette. This birthday dinner approached the magical.

How was the chicken? Well, to be honest, it was tougher than a velvety store-bought version — probably the beginnings of rigor mortis, which we could've avoided by letting the meat rest another day. But it was much fuller in flavor, almost as if the meat had been seasoned from the bone out.

The best part, though, was that I knew exactly how it lived, and just how it died. And that made it all the more delicious.

Click here to see the Philly-Style Chicken Cutlet Sandwich recipe. 

 

Adapted from an excerpt from "Serve Yourself" by Joe Yonan (10 Speed Press, 2011).