Medium Raw

In the darkness under my shroud, I realize that in my eagerness to fully enjoy this experience, I’ve closed my eyes. First comes the skin and the fat. It’s hot. So hot that I’m drawing short, panicky, circular breaths in and out—like a high-speed trumpet player, breathing around the ortolan, shifting it gingerly around my mouth with my tongue so I don’t burn myself. I listen for the sounds of jaws against bone around me but hear only others breathing, the muffled hiss of rapidly moving air through teeth under a dozen linen napkins. There’s a vestigial flavor of Armagnac, low-hanging fumes of airborne fat particles, an intoxicating, delicious miasma. Time goes by. Seconds? Moments? I don’t know. I hear the first snap of tiny bones from somewhere near and decide to brave it. I bring my molars slowly down and through my bird’s rib cage with a wet crunch and am rewarded with a scalding hot rush of burning fat and guts down my throat. Rarely have pain and delight combined so well. I’m giddily uncomfortable, breathing in short, controlled gasps as I continue, slowly—ever so slowly—to chew. With every bite, as the thin bones and layers of fat, meat, skin, and organs compact in on themselves, there are sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavors: figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood as my mouth is pricked by the sharp bones. As I swallow, I draw in the head and beak, which, until now, had been hanging from my lips, and blithely crush the skull.

What is left is the fat. A coating of nearly imperceptible yet unforgettable-tasting abdominal fat. I undrape, and, around me, one after another, the other napkins fall to the table, too, revealing glazed, blissed-out expressions, the beginnings of guilty smiles, an identical just-fucked look on every face.

No one rushes to take a sip of wine. They want to remember this flavor.

Flashback, not too many years. Close enough in time to still vividly remember the smell of unchanged Fryolator grease, the brackish stank of old steam-table water heating up, the scorched odor of a griddle caked with layers of ancient Mel-Fry.

It didn’t smell like ortolan.

I was working a lunch counter on Columbus Avenue. It was a “transitional” phase in my career, meaning I was transitioning from heroin to crack, and I was wearing a snap-front, white polyester dishwasher shirt with the name of the linen service over the left breast pocket, and dirty blue jeans. I was cooking pancakes. And eggs fucking Benedict—the English muffins toasted under the salamander on one side only, half-assed, ’cause I just didn’t care. I was cooking eggs over easy with pre-cooked bacon rewarmed on the griddle, and sunny-side ups, and some kind of a yogurt thing with nasty fruit salad and granola in it. I could make any kind of omelet with the fillings available, and the people who sat at my counter and placed their orders looked right through me. Which was good, because if they really saw me, really looked into my eyes, they’d see a guy who—every time somebody ordered a waffle—wanted nothing more than to reach forward, grab them by the hair, and drag a dirty and not particularly sharp knife across their throat before pressing their face into the completely fucked-up, always-sticky waffle iron. If the fucking thing worked anywhere near as inefficiently as it did with waffles, their face would later have to be pried off with a butter knife.

I was, needless to say, not a happy man. I had, after all (as I reminded myself frequently), been a chef. I had run entire kitchens. I had once known the power, the adrenaline rush of having twenty to thirty people working for me, the full-tilt satisfaction of a busy kitchen making food that one could (at least for the time and circumstances) be proud of. When you’ve known the light caress of Egyptian sailcloth against your skin, it’s all the more difficult to go back to poly—particularly when it’s adorned with the linen company’s logo of a fat, smilingly accommodating chef twirling his mustache.

At what seemed at the time to be the end of a long, absurd, strange, wonderful but lately awful road, there was nothing to be proud of. Except maybe the soup. I made the soup.

It was goulash.