Part of a Thanksgiving series celebrating (and eating) the bird — all of it — from head to feet.
Considering all the time it took to pluck a turkey, removing its innards was relatively painless. It required only three cuts, skin-deep. You aim to remove everything inside all at once, preserving the various systems, so that the organs don’t break or leak inside the cavity. Paul, one of the farmers from Violet Hill, drew out a map of incisions. And, of course, YouTube provided guidance, as well. In an age of Saran-wrapped meat, it was a little odd, anachronistic almost, to watch videos on the Internet about how to eviscerate a bird (like this one, wherein a woman inexplicably demonstrates her method with a baby strapped to her back). Nonetheless, the videos were informative.
I first cut along the back of the neck to free the esophagus and trachea, so that I could pull them out through the pelvis. I then flipped the turkey onto its back and cut across the skin, below the ribs and between the legs. One clean incision, and the creamy intestines spilled out, greenish from the excrement inside. The next stroke slit carefully down and then around the anus, so as to avoid puncturing any of the digestive organs, many of which promised a fowl mess if clipped. Puncturing the gallbladder is especially problematic because the digestive juices will begin to break down any meat that they touch.
The whole endeavor was a kind of thrilling anatomy lesson: discovering the crop, still full of a breadcrumb-like mixture of grains, speculating whether I had found the lungs and then actually finding them clinging to ribs, identifying the slime green gallbladder resting on the liver. A smell of raw poultry hung in the air, along with the stink of turkey shit, as feathers fell away to reveal a small turd exiting the body. The cleaning process felt purely scientific until I tried peeling the skin from the bird’s feet. It’s supposed to slide off like a rubber glove when you blanch it, but these feet were resisting, so I cut a line into the skin, hoping they might peel easier. As the paring knife ran along the side of the first foot, it hit a vein, and a tear of blood rolled out. That brought home the fact that, not forty-eight hours before, all the parts I was removing, separating, and dividing had once worked together to make a breathing animal.
Most people no longer participate in the raising, slaughtering, or butchering of what we consume. Understandable enough. I think people find offal unsettling because it reminds us of the organs that correspond with our own — brain, lungs, liver. Maybe instead we can appreciate them as life feeding life. On Thanksgiving, that is something we should be thankful for.
And for being at the top of the food chain.
THANKSGIVING 2012: Hacks, Recipes, and Wisdom on Eat Like a Man >>
