He who turneth the goose
By rights should have the neck.
It's an old English axiom, all of a thousand years old. I mention it not as an example of quaint eccentricity but as evidence of the extreme good sense of our medieval ancestors. They were smart enough to discover, through centuries of trial and error, that the neck of the bird is the best part of him. And they knew their meats. The nearer the bone, the nearer the extremities, the sweeter the meat.
The lords of the medieval manor threw to the serfs and underlings the part of the pig we cat and kept the head for themselves. They brought it in to the music of strings and horns and Latin carols, wreathed round with garlands of holly and sausages, roasted to a deep gold in which fat merged with lean, with a lemon in its tusks and a smile of beatitude on its curled lips and snout. Then they fell to and feasted on cackling till the oil of boar shone from their eyes and they went gaily out into the gales and snows of winter with summer singing under their rounded ribs.
Imagine what heaven it was for the man who turned the spit on which was roasted that medieval singer, that bird of the King, the swan, when, his task done, he curled up around two feet of palatine bliss which is the swan's neck! You who have discovered, like my mother years ago on Lost Paradise Farm, that the neck of the chicken is the tenderest and tastiest part, will know what a feast that must have been. I used to think it was sheer nobility in my mother to choose the Sunday chicken's neck as her share, so that we children could have all the breast meat. But I know now, as an adult and experienced eater, it was not nobility of character but plain good sense.
It stands to reason that the nearer one gets to the seat of reason in any creature, to the center of intelligence, the nearer one comes to excellence. The neck is on the way to the head; ergo, it is better earing than the body. But the best eating, naturally, is the head. There, where the wit and the spirit reside, lies the peak of perfection in flavor. It is so in the pig, in the calf, in the fish. Oh, especially in the fish! Smelt baked without the dainty heads and bright eyes and brains to flavor them are anticlimaxes. A chowder made of the heads of codfish is a chowder without peer. The lobster sees to it that his head is used in cooking, for he has pulled it ages ago into his body; one cannot prepare him for the feast without preparing also the feast of his bright brain and nervous intellect.
When one comes to the great fish, such as the halibut, who is almost a quarter of him head, one can see how the chances of happiness are multiplied if one throws away his body and eats only his bow end! It is again sheer common sense.
As a boy in copper-toed bonis and corduroy breeches that whistled when I walked, I remember one of the tiptop high-water marks of the winter season. It was baked halibut heads.
It was when the snow drifted into Alps around the farmhouse, when the wind from Labrador roared around the eaves and polished up old Orion coming up over the Atlantic to the east till he shone like the cupper toes on my boots, like the brass tacks on my horsehide trunk. It was a night out of the North Pole. It was bitter cold outside, but it was hot heaven in. The kitchen was full of the fragrance of meat of the sea that brought to the eyes brighter stars than those in Orion's belt. The oven door was open, and there, sizzling in their own fat, three or four vast halibut heads gazed up at our famished farm family. My mother dished them up in the great goose platter of Christmas and set them, surrounded by two or three mountains of hot cream-o'-tartar biscuits, at the heart of the table. My father said our favorite grace-the short one, Benedictus benedicat-and all hands of us, in skirts or pants or breeches, bowed to the board and hoed in and ate until we could hardly make one another out our checks were so rounded up under the eyes.
Now the halibut, in many, many ways, is a miracle of a fish. I understand, for instance, that the halibuts whole life cycle is something to amaze mankind and baffle the scientists. And anything that can baffle them I an: all for. They say the halibut is born and spends his babyhood as perpendicular in the water as a cod, with his eyes decently and decorously on each side of his handsome small head. But when we knew him best, in our hot Lost Paradise kitchen, he had become so Continental in his body that he had turned a huge horizontal slider of the mud, and though his mouth had stayed where it originally was, his left eye had rotated in some strange way around him head and joined his right-both looked up side by side on the top of his head toward the heavens as if to see where the next meal was coming from. His mouth was now sidewise. and he had grown in his vast bulk into a flat universe of a fish, forever doomed to crawl the floor of ocean with his eyes at the top of his flat head! It was remarkable, an involved lesson in piscatorial economy, the power of environment over matter, the ballistics of bulk, and the tragedy of progress.
But we on the farm did not give a whoop in the hazelwoods about all this. The tragedy of the halibut left us cold. His ballistics did not raise a ripple in us. We loved him for the sweetness he had managed to store away in that flat head of his, gray-green on top, cream-waite underneath, wide as half the world, ugly as sin, but full of glory when we bit into it hot.
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