The one and only meal I had helped to cook in China was actually chicken and dumplings. I had insisted that we should get fresh chicken, as I'm a bit concerned about buying meat lying out on a room temperature counter all day. So, off to the market we went, and selected a squawking, feathery chicken. I got to watch the whole killing and de-feathering of the whole animal, which was very intrinsically interesting to me. We had requested that they gut the animal as well, and it did seem that the butcher removed some of the internal organs. Much to my chagrin, when we got home, I noticed, oh, intestines and gall bladders and lungs in the chicken. Seems like they removed nothing from the chicken innards at all.
Which is where I got involved in the dinner making process, which basically was to eviscerate the chicken by hand. I suppose I got this job by default since it was I who insisted on a fresh, live chicken for dinner, and since my line of work makes me less queasy about manipulating internal organs. Thank goodness for anatomy class! So I had to cut out all of the abdominal organs, and then the thoracic ones. Cut the aorta along the way, so the heart started spilling blood over all the pleural viscera, which was no good. At any rate, I got her relatively cleaned up, and then we boiled her up and ate her.
1 comment:
Mmmm...she was mighty tasty too, in a French broth and dumplings!
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