a Hoosick Farms roast chicken, considerably abused

I’ve been working till six or seven most nights. It takes me about forty minutes to get home. I have a dog. For anything involving more than a quick fry, this demands the following routine: get home. Get dinner going. Walk dog. Feed dog. Finish preparing dinner. Feed dinner to self and girlfriend. Do dishes. Write something.

All you parents out there, feel free to start laughing.

The scheduling problems of one unmarried guy may not amount to a hill of Goya gandules in this world, but I’ll tell you one thing that does matter: a decent roast chicken. Now, I’m not here to tell you how to roast a chicken. If you’re looking for a recipe, it comes down to this: wash your chicken. Dry your chicken. Salt your chicken. Roast your chicken. I throw some cayenne and tarragon in there. I switch the heat every now and again: this week 375, next week 425. I change the pans. Right at the moment, I’m doing it in the cast iron pot, for reasons that apparently matter more in theory than in practice. Sometimes I baste, sometimes I don’t. So long as I don’t roast it wet, and I pull it from the oven at about the right time, it comes out fine, as homey and tasty and salt-skinned and delicate-fleshed, as irresistibly pickable-at, as only a roast chicken can be. The skin puffs and crisps. The juices run pale from the pierced thick of the thigh. The drumstick moves with a laxity. The wing is like some lovely papillote, were the papillote edible. There’s a lot of fuss made about the right way to roast a chicken, but my contention is this: if you can’t roast a chicken, you don’t need a cookbook, you need therapy.

You may not even need that fancy a chicken. Tonight’s victim hailed from Hoosick River Farms, where they raise some lovely chickens and swine, the eggs and flesh from which make it regularly to my local greenmarket. My moderately-sized chicken cost me $13. When you consider that this thing was a living, breathing bird, possessed, like all chickens, with a defined and socially-circumscribed personality; that it scratched and ate; that it molted, etc… well, then, $13, isn’t a lot of money. I know for sure that it’s a tastier bird that the Purdue Oven Stuffer Roasters of my supermarket childhood. It’s not pumped full of water. It tastes like chicken in the sense that it tastes like the real live bird that it was, as opposed to tasting like chicken in the sense of tasting like nothing in particular (see Oven Stuffer Roaster, above). The question in my mind is whether my $13 chicken is $5 better than the equivalently-sized factory-organic name-brand “free-range” chicken to which I default. To be honest, I don’t know.

I haven’t been to Hoosick River Farm, but they’re up in that vague and homely zone between New York and Vermont, so they must be virtuous and let their chickens run free, etc. They don’t have fancy branding, just a paper price tag, which, to me, is another indicator of virtue. The chicken itself smells fresh and clean, even if it is bemoanedly devoid of giblets. Yes, it’s a lovely bird, but I can’t taste a difference between it and the equivalently-sized factory-organic name-brand “free-range” chicken of my default. I’m not saying that nobody could. There are people in this world who are sure that eggs from your own chickens taste objectively better than decent-quality eggs from the store. There are also people in this world who claim they can hear the difference between different speaker wires, enough to spend — I shit you not — thousands of dollars on the less-sonically-degenerative premium product. Perhaps I am canted too far towards the yang, but I am not one of them. To me, what would make the $5 price differential between the $13 Hoosick River chicken and the $8 default bird meaningful is that I feel better about it. I feel better from buying from what I believe to be a small family farm. I feel better about this idyll I have in my head of a small green swatch at a bend in the Hoosick, where men are men, women are women, and chickens are chickens to the fullest. I feel better about buying this chicken, because even if my community farm doesn’t get a cut, they’re at least able to offer a larger bill of goods, which encourages people to buy from them in a serious way. But does it taste $5 better?

I retire to attend the crickets of my judgment.