What Have We Done with the Thighs?

Where have all the thighs gone? Where are the thighs of yesteryear? This is not exactly a litany raised by many, but the heartfelt concern of a few. In recent memory I do not believe that I have entered a restaurant where thighs are allowed to stand alone proudly by themselves. I mean chicken thighs, though duck and turkey thighs are also lonely and neglected.

On a recent trip to New York via L.A. I tried to raise the thigh alarm in both places to show biz folks in au courant restaurants.

“God, what I'd do for a plate of thighs, you know, grilled in paillard form with a sauce made of garlic that has been roasted with olive oil and thyme, then puréed and spread on the crisp thigh skin. Alice Waters makes them that way.”

“I think that's Mike Nichols's agent,” a lady answered.

“Once on safari in Brazil I ate a big platter of roasted thighs with a blazing hot chimichurri pepper sauce in Bahia, then it was off to the jungle up the Rio del Muerto where we were trying to catch a big anaconda for the new Disney theme park in North Dakota. I was lost for thirty days and ended up using duct tape for toilet paper.”

“I think I saw part of it on PBS,” a producer in an Armani power blazer said. “In Taos where I met Dennis Hopper's cousin Duane. Duane Hopper. They're both from Dodge City, Kansas.”

“Yeah, I've been there. The lady at the Best Western fried me three thighs for breakfast. With biscuits and pan gravy.”

“Let me correct myself. That isn't Mike Nichols's agent. It's only Roger Ebert's agent. I heard R. E. just wrote a hot screenplay called Naked Scouts on Their Birthdays,” the lady chimed in.

“I think chicken breasts are the moral equivalent of a TV commercial. I make Bocuse's poulet au vinaigre only with thighs,” I insisted.

“The Budweiser Clydesdales are really getting dreary,” she replied. “Dalmatians are cute in the snow.”

“So are zebras.” I watched as she ordered a poached chicken breast, insisting on flat-leafed Italian parsley on the side, as if it were intended to save this filet de torpor.

So I am a voice crying out in the wilderness. A casual inquiry to my brother, who runs the University of Arkansas library system in Fayetteville, and has contacts with Tyson, the world's largest producer of chicken for the table, revealed (hold onto your ass!) that the U.S. shipped 50,000 metric tons of thighs and legs to Russia in 1990! I fear I do not comprehend the mind that remains unstunned by this figure. It fatigues the brain, and deep in the forest on my daily hike I leaned against a lightning-blasted beech tree, a power spot, and imagined a thousand of these tons frozen into the shape of a prone King Kong in the hold of a giant freighter. I had gotten rid of one but had forty-nine to go. So many thighs, so many freighters.

Other notions began to spin off through the wintry air. Are we shipping our vigor, our strength, abroad? Would the ghost of D. H. Lawrence suggest that we fear thighs because of their proximity to the organs of reproduction and evacuation? Is it because we are still mummy's children and crave the anonymous, tasteless breast? Is it a subconscious fear of AIDS? Probably not, as sixty percent of those under thirty in America have never seen a live chicken and couldn't tell a thigh from Jon Bon Jovi's chin. Once I prepared quail for an actress of some note who doubled as a vegetarian. She was appalled after dinner to discover she had eaten a “living thing.”

“Not after it was shot and plucked and roasted at 400 degrees for twenty-three minutes,” I offered, suspecting Quaaludes.

Back in the forest I imagined the shark carnage that would occur if a freighter sank with such a cargo, the ship breaking up and the immense, frozen blocks of chicken thighs slowly melting in the saltwater. Strangely enough in the old days in Key West I once night-fished with a Cuban for sharks with a live chicken, the big hook bound to the hen's body with twine. For reasons of squeamishness I did not hold the rod with the live chicken bait but drove the getaway car. Soon enough we were eating broiled shark steaks and tending a shark stew laden with garlic and fresh tomatoes. Much of the hen was still intact though a bit of a mess to pluck. Not surprisingly, the shark had headed for the rear end where the flavor resides.

I left the woods and made my way over to Hattie's Grille in Suttons Bay, my favorite restaurant in the vast expanse of northern Michigan, though there are three others that could also survive in the competitive atmosphere of Chicago, or the coasts—The Rowe Inn, Tapawingo, and the Walloon Lake Inn. Naturally there are other good places but they have largely neglected a responsibility of first-rate restaurants, which is to educate our palates. Jim Milliman is the owner and chef of Hattie's Grille, assisted by Alice Clayton, a birdlike young woman who is breathtakingly deft in the kitchen.

When I arrived during the afternoon prep work Milliman was busy making three desserts, bread, and a pâté all at once. Then his wife, Beth, called and asked if he could whip up a white-chocolate mousse. He smiled and began chopping Belgian white chocolate. I poured a largish glass of Trefethen Cabernet, which is a steal, and was reminded again of the sheer speed that is demanded of the chef. I used to daydream of becoming one but the fantasy dissipates when reflecting on the exhaustion of preparing a dinner for ten. My own restaurant could only accept a daily party of four, at most. My hands are clumsy. I typed five novels with a single forefinger. Frankly, this limited my interest in revision.

Milliman doesn't go in for fancy names for his creations; his smoked whitefish pâté is called just that, and a lovely dish of his devising, medallions of Maine lobster in a tequila sauce, carries no frilly adjectives. He is particularly skillful with seafood though I enjoy his pheasant potpie, the garlicked veal chop on a wild-rice pancake, his chicken thighs braised in stock, cream and shiitakes.

I was strangely silent, sipping or gulping my wine, in hopes I would be asked what was bothering me.

“What's bothering you?” asked Milliman, who is accustomed to me in full babble about food matters.

I explained my thigh thoughts, ranging through culinary history down to the sociopolitical implications of exclusionary food faddism, the penchant for fey minimalism in the upwardly mobile groups. I finished with, “Do you think this all stands for something bigger?”

“Absolutely,” Milliman said. Then we discussed approximately a hundred good ways to cook chicken thighs, branching out into turkey thighs (I favor the nutrition nag Jane Brody's way of poaching them in vermouth with fresh vegetables and a head of garlic). For duck thighs and legs you need go no further than Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of South-West France, or to Madeleine Kamman. Alice Waters bones rabbit thighs and grills them with pancètta and fresh sage. I prefer my thighs with two wines I got from Waters's husband, the wine merchant Stephen Singer: any Bandol, or a chianti called Isole.

On the way home I stopped at the grocer's for a slice of pork steak, a white-trash proclivity of mine. You pretend you're cutting off all the fat. It's the rare restaurant that offers pork steak. Doubtless it's being sent to China along with hard-to-find pig hocks. On the bulletin board in the grocery foyer someone was offering “Rabbits, Pets or Meat” on a three-by-five card.

This is a visceral world, I reflected, watching the carloads of deer hunters in bright orange milling up and down the country roads in the cold rain. There would be a big kill this year with extra permits given in lieu of extensive orchard damage. I have an orchard and couldn't shoot a deer for eating my young trees, but then I don't depend on the orchard for a living. On the rare occasion I deer hunt I hike the vacant Lake Michigan beaches where the deer notably aren't to avoid shooting one. This is horribly dishonest as venison is by far my favorite meat. I'm forced to hang around local taverns with a long face, saying such things as “If I hadn't lost my eye in the Tet Offensive (a fib) old mister swamp buck would've been deader than a door-nail.” Then I accelerate by asking for lesser cuts, the heart and liver, or the whole neck, including the bones, from which you can make a splendid carbonnade or posole. It usually works.

What we eat depends on where we live and how we have come to look at ourselves. An increasingly smaller part of our population has been raised within an age-old agricultural cycle where hunting and gathering are still a dominant, if waning, force in life. I find it disturbing to see recently all the life-style Nazis afoot prating about what one should drink, eat, read. Of course there is no dialogue. Given a choice between the NRA and animal rights I'll choose a rowboat anytime.

In his wonderful new book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder says, “Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.” Snyder is a Zen Buddhist and I doubt he would condone hunting except by native populations. The point is our “distance.” I question the virtue of not knowing where your food comes from, whether it's the chicken on the conveyor belt clucking its way toward the knife, the steer waiting for the stun-gun, the fish gasping in foreign air among hundreds of others. On the goofy outer edge, researchers at Yale discovered that plants react when a shrimp is killed in their presence. Of course there is nothing so immediately rewarded in America, in the arts, entertainment, or public life, as a shrill and limited consciousness.

To be Christian, or something, maybe the Russians need the thighs more than we do. Once they're dead they may as well be eaten and for reasons involving the lack of soul we're not doing the job. I just worry that the Russians don't have the proper condiments—the fresh garlic and herbs, peppers, hot sauces, BBQ sauces, the wild mushrooms, leeks, and cream.

HOT TIPS—New product by Tabasco to make more-than-presentable chili quickly, called “TABASCO 7 Spice Chili Recipe (Spicy).” It will enrage the legion of chili bores we've all met. The best human thighs are visibly owned by Stephanie Seymour (Sports Illustrated calendars) and Madeleine Stowe (actress). As Pai Chang said a thousand years ago, “Just melt the inner and outer mind together completely.”

1991