Cooking from scratch is a visceral endeavor. In a restaurant our food comes to us stripped of its history, removed from its point of reference as a living thing. When we take our food from start to finish we understand it better, and appreciate it more.
I'm making stock, so today I separated skin from flesh, flesh from bone. I started with an animal whole and reduced it to parts, watching and learning from the way it came apart under my hands. Breaking down a chicken is a tricky business, you have to probe with your fingers to find the joints and grains, then follow fingers with knives. Popping joints and cracking bones takes patience, and mettle.
I want to say that taking an animal apart is unpleasant, but it isn't. It's satisfying and clear and certain, and the pile of carefully butchered bits at the end is a delight. We want to be apologetic about consuming animals, but rather than mumbling our mea culpas we would be better served by experiencing the act completely. Consciousness is a better eulogy than squeamishness and false compassion.
We should want to feel and experience and understand our food more completely. I cannot -- currently -- grow the food that I eat or raise the animals, but I can get closer than I do. Tonight, rendering fat and breaking bones, I am reminded of just how pure these pleasures are. Cooking something from start to finish -- seeing it go from whole to parts to whole again -- is wholly more satisfying than compromise and shortcuts.
Once I broke down the chicken (and also a duck for confit), I roasted the bones with roughly chopped onions, carrots and celery. They came from the oven with a rich, roasted smell, already like something you'd want to eat. I dropped them into my bigger-than-big stock pot, simultaneously the most inconvenient and wonderful pot I own. Scrapings from the pan came up with water and were added to the pot; it would be a crime to lose those wonderful caramelized bits. Then more water until everything was covered, a sachet of herbs floating lazily across the surface.
Butchered and roasted and stewed and strained, then cooked again into the soup that will finally make it to the table. Making stock isn't difficult, but it is a slow, conscious process; with each step as pleasurable as the attention that you give it. When cooking, this is what I strive to do; invest myself in each step - hear the crack of small, tender bones, feel the soft give of flesh, smell the rich sweetness of roasted carrots. This conscious art in even the simplest of procedures is the best of cooking.
Stock is a staple, cooks make it daily and it figures into countless dishes. Still, the simplicity and ubiquity of stock should not make it pedestrian. Roasted bones cracked by hand; bright, fresh vegetables; fragrant herbs; things of beauty went into the pot and a thing of beauty came out of it at the end. We should give our food and our cooking this attention every day; we should allow no thing to be pedestrian. In the kitchen we are alchemists and magicians, how could we allow this to be ordinary?
