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 Chicken and dumplings, if done correctly, is not only a comfort food, not only meant to be savored, but it is something meant to be wallowed in, like you were suddenly an inch tall and swimming in warmish soup. The broth is everything. Fresh chicken allowed to burble with celery, carrot, onion. An indolent chicken. A lazy chicken. Boiled at medium low heat for a long, long time until the flavor is sucked even from the bones.
The flavors in chicken and dumplings come from all over the world. Developed by many different people. Anonymous people from cultures distant in both time and place. Chickens originally came from Malaysia, domesticated in India. The Romans were known to divine the future by observing chicken pecking patterns. I’m sure with a little research I could get a more complete picture of this. Guys in togas watching a chicken peck at food. No more bizarre I suppose than observing entrails or tea leaves or lines on a palm. What did it mean when the chickens pecked each other. Or your hand?
When I get my chicken it’s already dead. Packaged. I don’t have to wring it’s neck or pluck it’s feathers. I needn’t concern myself with pecking. The pecking order was set long before the chickens or I were born. The lives of chickens, by and large, have been subsumed under human necessity and desire. We want to taste chicken. We want things that taste like chicken, so we control every aspect of chicken lives to feed our protein needs. I don’t want to know what it’s life was like before I put it in the pot. Read more »
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Once upon a time, I totaled my car. Rolled it. It was a slow roll, which was probably a good thing since I didn’t have my seatbelt on. I destroyed my Cutlass Supreme, which had once reached 110 miles per hour on an empty stretch of Texas highway, because of a tuna fish sandwich I was eating for breakfast. I dropped it in the floor and was trying to retrieve it, swerved, drove up on a bank and bam. Canned tuna, Miracle Whip, pickle relish and celery seed. That’s what it takes to kill a car.
I got this job in a restaurant on the Blue Ridge Parkway so I could save enough to get another vehicle. When you don’t have much money, a lot of your time is spent worrying about transportation, at least in the U.S. Other countries, even some places in the States have this crazy thing called reliable mass transit, but where I was it was more like a myth, a legend, a vague hope in some damn liberal’s head. So I got this crappy job.
I lived in the old inn, which had been condemned but they let workers live there if they wanted. Every morning, way before dawn, I was up and cracking eggs into large containers, mixing pancake batter, prepping huge sheets of bacon. I discovered that if you baked enough bacon there will always be a few perfect pieces. The melt in your mouth kind-not burnt, not floppy…flavorful enough to send shivers into your nether regions. Granted, I wasn’t getting any, and maybe that had something to do with it, but perfect bacon can be a reasonable substitute for an orgasm.
Old Aunt Bee sat in the corner making biscuits and cobbler in the morning. Her favorite thing to do was to catch people doing something wrong…taking a smoke break without permission, eating food on the line, having too much fun…and then she would report it to the manager. She had one glass eye, and absolutely no sense of humor, sitting like some ancient crone queen surveying her dominion, muttering to herself. Her biscuits were good, though.
There was also the old man who was the morning dishwasher. He came in every day with a six pack of beer, and hid it in the ice machine. By noon he’d be singing country love songs and slurring his words. The manager knew all about it but didn’t care as long as the dishes got clean. He fell in love with one of the cashiers in the gift shop, but she wanted nothing to do with him. Not long after that he was found dead of a self-inflicted gun shot wound, sitting in his truck at one of the overlooks. Love’s a bitch.
This other guy I had to work with sometimes would start sprinklng cocaine into folded papers and snorting it during his shift. The more cocaine he had, the more useless he became, until by the end of the morning I would be doing his job and mine. There were lots of people like that. The desperate. The deluded. It seeps into you after a while.
I was cooking hundreds of eggs a day. Over easy, over hard, soft-boiled, poached, omelets, scrambled, no yolk, on and on. Thousands and thousands of chicken ova with pig muscle and pig fat and Aunt Bee’s goddamn biscuits. Egg white slithered into my dreams.
Every now and then I would take a smoke break. Smoking and being a short order cook really do go together-a convenient excuse to get away from the pressure and the smell. No one argues with a smoke break. I would go out back and stand as far away from the garbage dumpsters as I could, getting my little nicotine release, trying to forget chickens even existed. One morning on my break the air was so swollen with moisture that the sun stayed red as it rose, and the sky was sherbert orange. In this bizarre light the Appalachians were stretched out for a hundred miles of olive green, poking up through the rising fog. There was a double rainbow, mostly red because of the sun. I was so lost in it I forgot to go back in for a long while, watching colors change and clouds form, like everything before had led to this.
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One summer, when I was nineteen, I stayed at an organic farm. Theoretically, you could say that I was working on the farm, but I was, alas, a lazy farmer. If I had been a fairytale character, something awful would have happened to me as a result of my sloth. The farm was owned by a woman who had dreams of creating a farm collective of like-minded women. Staunch female organic farmers, carving out their place in the wilderness of modern life. It was a nice idea that just didn’t work out, ultimately. Anyway, I was there for a summer.
During the course of the summer, I discovered certain things about myself. For one thing, not only do I love fried okra (always have), but I love the okra plant. Read more »
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