Illustration by Magali Pirard

Duck & Cover

Shake off that fear of flying (over to the exotic poultry section)

By Marina Wolf

THE DUCK with dirty rice and eggplant-sweet potato gravy was a simple menu, as far as Cajun food goes: only five or six subrecipes, sweet potato cut up and cooked three different ways, three quarts of homemade stock added a half a cup at a time and then simmered down to one tenth of its original volume. Three ducks for two people seemed a little extreme, but when working from a recipe I always follow a simple, yet important, precept: Don’t mess around with the measurements until you’ve done it right one time by the book. (“Don’t feed anything untested to people who don’t share your bed” is Commandment No. 2).

So, three ducks it was. Actually obtaining them wasn’t a problem. I knew our local independent food market would have them. G&G (Grand & Grotesque? Gritty & Gratifying?) looks like the shlumpiest of supermarkets, with a logo and shopping carts left behind from the ’50s, but in fact it has a well-deserved reputation for stocking obscure (to the typical Western palate) foodstuffs. Headcheese? Check. Organic St. John’s wort energy drink? Check. French cookies hand-rolled by rosy-cheeked virgins in the Alps? Check. The G&G supermarket is much like a Middle Eastern marketplace, without the dirt and the flies: anything you might want to ingest is there.

The ducks lay in the refrigerator case, as tamely wrapped as the turkey breasts on the next shelf over. It was only when I picked up one package and turned it over looking for an expiration date that I understood how much work really lay ahead. I made eye contact with the duck.

Now, I am not easily spooked by dead animals and their body parts. I have paused next to cows’ heads and bargained for bits of beef at some of the best and busiest farmers’ markets in Russia. I actually like beef tongue sandwiches, and have wrestled with gristly pig haunches on more than one festive occasion. But somehow, staring at those opaque black beads that peered out through a double layer of plastic wrap, my stomach twitched and I had to pause. The duck, being dead, didn’t even blink.

Obviously my response had something to do with eyes, a response that I probably share with many middle-class Americans. For example, we tend to be disturbed by the eye in Chinese whole-fish dishes, even though the condition of the eyes is the best measure of the fish’s freshness.

But I also think it’s representative of a larger problem of how disconnected Americans tend to be from the source of their food and its original state. The other night I overheard a conversation at a restaurant. Someone was apparently putting a lot of cream in his coffee, so a tablemate suggested that they bring a cow to the table and he could help himself. The cream-lover’s reaction was swift and strong: “Milk from a cow? Disgusting!”

Even produce, which has no eyes or bodily fluids to gross us out, seems somehow excessive, obscene, or dirty unless it’s been processed, cleaned, and chopped up as much as possible first. The first time I made a recipe that called for beet greens, I looked and looked in a Safeway for them. The beets there were invariably shorn of their crowns, sitting lumpy and crimson with no indication that they had ever reached through the ground toward the light.

Of course, beets are not birds. I could rationalize my unease with some sort of post-industrial hyperhygienic angst, or run over it with a cynical postmodern hedonism, but it was still there, the moral muddle that underlies the consciousness of any thinking meat-eater. The eyes of a dead animal are windows to our hungry souls.

The funny thing is that I still harbor some vague fantasies about getting my girlfriend and me a few acres out in the country someday, with space for a big garden and some chickens. What happens to the chickens in my fantasy looks a lot like that scene in Babe, where Farmer Hoggett strides firmly to the slaughtering room, passing over our porcine hero for an at-first nameless duck. The camera cuts away, we hear a flutter of wings and some frantic quacking, and then he heads back to the house, an unidentified bundle dangling from his hand.

TO FILL in the blanks in my imagination, I recently asked friends with chickens to invite me over the next time they kill one. If I can’t watch it, perhaps I don’t deserve to eat it. They haven’t called me yet, so these ducks were simply the next step down that path. They were already dead; my job was just to take off the bits that would remind us too much of that fact.

I thought about these things all the way home, ducks sitting at the bottom of bags in the back. Well, of course I bought them. What could I do? I had talked up the recipe for days to my sweetie, and had invested in a five-pound bag of cayenne pepper for the event. And the actual preparation wasn’t as bad as I had feared (or hoped). My prime piece of German cutlery seemed very dull as I cut the neck, but some minor thug on the poultry farm had taken the trouble of breaking the bird’s legs for me, so the feet came off easily.

I duly plastered the ducks with a pungent paste of spices and salt, roasted them for hours, and let them cool, then prepared the rest of the dishes. After only 10 hours (I did mention this was an easy menu, right?), the food was ready. The dirty rice fluffed up nicely, forming a perfect cradle on my plate for the rich spicy gravy, with the half-duck lying in state on the side, crackling brown. Before I dug in I paused again, looking over the edge into my omnivorous heart. I knew more about duck now than before; my innocence, my ignorance was gone. I was a more culpable cook.

But I will say this: it was delicious.

From the October 11-17, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Celebrity status: Annie R. McCarter.

Morsels

Bowled Over

By Greg Cahill

DO YOU LIKE SOUP? Great bowls of steaming hot soup? Refreshing cups of chilled gazpacho? A hearty minestrone? Shrimp bisque? Purée of roasted eggplant and garlic soup? Creamed chestnut soup with fresh ginger? How about a nice posole-poblano soup with smoked pork and jalapeno jack cheese?

The CIA at Greystone in Napa County has them all, ready for those cool fall days and nights, in The CIA Book of Soups (Lebhar-Friedman, 2001), edited by Mary D. Donovan and S. Armentrout: broths, cream soups, cold soups, chowders, and puréed soups, plus accompaniments (croutons, buttermilk biscuits, palmiers with prosciutto, et al.). That’s 130 tasty and surprisingly simple recipes from the kitchens and classrooms of the nation’s premier cooking institute, along with a few pointers on soup basics.

Just in time for soup season (hey, that’s year round, buddy!). Hmmmm. Dive in . . . . .

On the Shelf

A COOKBOOK of favorites from Wal-Mart staff? Believe it. And while most of the recipes in the Wal*Mart Family Cookbook (Try-Foods Int’l, 2001) fit the church potluck mold, there is a scrumptious-sounding entry from Annie R. McCarter of Santa Rosa dubbed Annie & Tyrone’s Illusional Rocky Road Brownies. Sounds cosmic and deelish: made from scratch, loaded with chocolate and nuts, and at 248 calories per serving, these have just got to be good! McCarter becomes the star at her store at a book signing on Saturday, Oct. 6, from 1 to 3 p.m., at Wal-Mart, 4625 Redwood Drive, Rohnert Park.

From the October 4-10, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by David Licht

Burned at the Steak

Rant & roll: Carnivore culinary control gets the ax

By Christina Waters

AS MUCH AS it pains me to report this–some of you are still eating red meat! I know, I know. It’s almost Cro-Magnon, but there it is. Beef is still what’s for dinner in many philistine homes, homes where Coors Lite is the beverage of choice, where Kools are still smoked, and where the television has been on continuously since Gerald Ford was in office.

Let’s call these the Households of Darkness. The corpulent residents of such households–let’s not even use the word home to describe these troughs of ignorance–still order bacon with their eggs and dress up for a trip to McDonald’s.

Picture them. Obese, clad in polyester, they are well on their way to adult-onset diabetes. Apparently too fat to leave the house, these unfortunates haven’t yet gotten the word about cholesterol. They’ve heard about it, but they don’t quite get the connection between the C word and sudden death by stroke or heart attack.

All that butter, all that animal fat goes directly to the arteries, where it sits. It sits and waits for other globs of animal fat. Then when there are enough globs they form a fat blockade and prevent the flow of blood to important areas, like the heart and the brain. In short, the meat-eating bubba gets stupid and dead quicker than the rest of us.

Why, then, are people still eating meat? First of all, there’s that Genesis thing–you know, where God gave man dominion over the animals. Many a Republican likes to sling that quotation around as sort of a Judeo-Christian carte blanche to destroy every living thing that isn’t nailed down.

Actually God was giving humans permission to take care of animals–not to slaughter and eat them. Furthermore, in the first book of Genesis, God also gave Adam and Eve every manner of plant as their food. Not pork ribs and rack of lamb. Not bacon bits and Vienna sausage. The Garden of Eden was a veritable vegetopia, and only after the unfortunate incident with the serpent was the first bratwurst created.

THEN there’s this masculinity thing surrounding the consumption of red meat, the bloodier the better. Today’s insecure carnivore male actually believes that real men don’t eat quiche. Many a sagging ego (itself a metaphor for another sagging entity) has been propped up by a bacon cheeseburger from Burger King (430 calories, 10 grams of saturated fat).

Hey, it was “dominion,” guys. Not “domination.” Given that menus refer to carcasses euphemistically, there isn’t even an honest respect given to the animal being consumed. “Chateaubriand” is really “dead cow,” French or no French.

That we are squeamish about eating red meat is evident in the distance that is placed between the product we consume and its actual source. An ex-New Yorker confessed to me several years ago at a gathering in the Santa Cruz Mountains, “I was 20 years old before I found out that beef didn’t come wrapped in plastic.”

Those quarter-pounders you’re wolfing down (590 calories, 11 grams of saturated fat) contain the flesh of what was once an 800-pound creature. That delicate foie gras is actually a vital organ of a beautiful and intelligent bird. It always sounds less cruel in another language, doesn’t it?

How many of us would even consider eating baby back ribs if we first had to catch, kill, and butcher the pig itself? At least the ancient Romans were honest. They brought the entire pig to the table and pulled it apart with their bare hands. Barbaric, but direct. One visit to the stockyard, any stockyard, would cure most of us of that hankering for a big ole juicy steak. (And what is this need for quantity? Steaks are invariably listed on menus in terms of their weight, as if eating more is a sign of power, or machismo. Eating a steak the size of Anchorage is only a symptom of one thing: gluttony.)

Now I might cut some slack here if we were living in North Dakota, where fresh vegetables are an endangered species, where grown women have never even seen an artichoke, and everything comes from a can or a box. But this is California, where perfect, fresh, organic vegetables outnumber even cell phones.

I’m convinced that people continue to eat red meat because they’re lazy and because they’ve convinced themselves that they are immune to statistics. If we weren’t intended to eat meat, God wouldn’t have made Rolaids.

It’s quicker and easier to just swing by Burger King-where a Double Whopper with cheese runs a terrifying 1,020 calories and 25 grams of saturated fat-than to buy unprocessed vegetables, noninstant rice, and maybe some fresh salmon, and actually prepare it yourself.

Fast food is really fast grease, and everybody knows it–including the disgustingly overweight people who frequent places like KFC and McDonald’s. As for not believing the statistics, even if you only watch TV you’re aware of the health dangers (never mind the environmental ones) of eating red meat, which just recently was linked–again–with colon cancer.

It’s amazing how meat-eaters think that vegetarians are weird. Is it weird to be lean and healthy? Is it weird to respect our bodies and not poison them with decaying carcasses of fellow living creatures? Is it normal to stuff ourselves with what George Bernard Shaw called the “scorched corpses of animals”?

It’s gotta be a self-esteem issue for those of limited reasoning ability. I may be a loser, the carnivore thinks, but at least I’m better than this dead critter I’m eating.

And then there’s the snob value, the arriviste factor of meat-eating.

Only peasants would willingly eat a meatless meal, bubba believes. The ability to put a chicken in every pot and a steak on every plate continues to be a sign of status. Savvy vegetarians in the West figured out that the way to combat the snob appeal of beef was by giving even greater status to designer produce. Portobellos now have as much clout as Porterhouse, heirloom tomatoes can command prices once reserved for carpaccio.

THIS IS A GOOD sign. Because the reasons to remove red meat from your life are many. Ethically, it’s unconscionable to pamper your pets and still be a partner to the slaughter of cattle, sheep, bunnies, and pigs. We share this planet with others. They don’t kill us, and we can survive quite nicely without killing them.

Legumes, green leafy vegetables, fruits, soy products, whole grains–put them all together and you’ve got delicious paths to health and longevity. Bubba will die sooner and more horribly than those who follow the meat-free lifestyles of Tolstoy, Buddha, Leonardo da Vinci, Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, and Albert Schweitzer. (Even a pig like Hitler was smart enough to give up meat.)

If you enjoy being permanently overweight and plagued by arthritis and indigestion, keep chowing down on bacon, burgers, and barbecued ribs. If you want to contribute to the death of the planet, the eradication of green space, and the pollution of clean air, then by all means make McDonald’s your favorite restaurant. And if death by heart attack sounds good, Sizzler awaits. Remember, you are what you eat. Dead meat.

Christina Waters’ last article sang the praises of meat and dismissed veganism–go figure.

From the October 4-10, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.