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I don’t want to appear to be a complete idiot so I always end up chewing on gizzards.

The Source

I don’t want to appear to be a complete idiot so I always end up chewing on gizzards. It never fails. I stand in front of the deli chicken display at County Market looking at the two bins of savory cracklings labeled “Livers and Gizzards.” It should be simple. One tub contains livers while the other holds the gizzards. I like livers. Gizzards wear me out. I don’t know of a soul in the history of chicken-eating-mankind who’s ever been able to chew a gizzard down to a swallowable gulp. I always gnaw on it until it resembles something only slightly larger than my windpipe and then try to swallow. I know that all I have to do is turn around to the friendly folks behind Tom Glossup’s Deli counter and ask which are the livers, but then the bald guy who only appeared to be a fool would be found out for certain. So I guess and I’m always wrong. Maybe I’m in shock. I stand there looking at this mass of livers (or maybe it’s gizzards) and wonder, “What a magnificent chicken it must have been to produce six pounds of internal organs! That was surely one Rhode Island Red on steroids!” The whole business of modern chicken production has my feathers ruffled. Like….Whatever happened to the wishbone? Are they now raising an entire generation of unlucky chickens? Mom would pass around the platter and brother Keith and I would grab for the wishbone then perform the old ritual of splitting the thing to see who’d get a wish. Keith wondered why he always lost and I never told him that the secret was to place your thumb at the top of the bone. But do you ever see a wishbone in a Deli or on one of the Colonel’s plasticware plates? In their devotion to produce the perfect chicken have they bred the wishbone out of the poor hen’s body? And what happened to the neck? Okay, it was bony and grizzly but a chicken neck could cling onto about a quarter pound of Grandma’s breading and it was darned delicious. I’ve not visited a modern chicken-producing factory, but I can envision thousands and thousands neckless cluckers wandering around the barnyard with their heads sitting precariously upon their chests. Without a neck how do you turn around to see who’s coming after you? Of course if a fried chicken eatery really wanted to jack up their business it would hire nothing but grandmothers to fry the chicken. I apologize to all you young mothers and stay-at-home dads, but you cannot be a top chicken fryer unless you are someone’s grandmother. Sorry, but I’m an expert. I’ve done the research. I’ve eaten the chicken. I recently learned on The Food Network that these franchise chicken places do not fry their poultry then put the cracklin’s into the milk gravy. The gravy comes with cracklin’s attached. No self-respecting grandmother would get a thigh from one chicken and cracklin’s from another. Cross contamination of the worst sort. Grandma would bust a gizzard if she saw such a thing happen. I always read The New Yorker restaurant reviews. I’ll never eat in those places but it makes good noontime reading to scan the delights of foi gras and truffles as I munch on my Arenzville bologna sandwich. Last week’s issue featured a restaurant in Brooklyn called St. Anselm that serves the entire chicken…feet, head, neck and all. If you question the waiter about this peculiar outlay on your plate he’ll politely remind you that guinea pigs in Peru are served with their heads on to prove that they’re not cats. That’s probably all the culinary information I’d need. (When you order their vanilla ice cream for dessert, the “garnish of spicy crackling” is fried pig skin.) I was always the oddball in the family with my preference for dark meat. When the menu says “White meat ten cents extra,” I’m delighted to watch others pay premium price for what I consider to be an inferior cut of meat. You may call it “light and flavorful,” but to me it’s simply “the dry part of the chicken.” I’m glad that Buffalo Wings are such a hit in the barrooms of the world, for I fear that once they’ve started breeding the necks and wishbones out of chicken the dark meat might be doomed. At least they have allowed the new breed of factory chickens keep their livers…even if they taste like gizzards.