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.
By the way, we had a hired man once on Lost Paradise who looked very much like a halibut. He was flat and broad and dragged low on the earth in his prodigious pants; his mouth was definitely off-center; and his eyes, my father always said, were much too close together and bulged. He wasn't a very good hired man and he wasn't with us long. We couldn't trust him; he was too lazy. Maybe halibuts in their hefty maturity grow lazy and untrustworthy, too, for all I know. But I often wondered, when the man was still with us, if he didn't maybe have concealed about him somewhere a miraculous tenderness like that of a baked halibut, or didn't at least have peachstones carved into baskets somewhere in his voluminous pants that he might like to give to small boys. He wasn't with us long enough for me to find out. But maybe he was like that interesting toad which, like adversity itself, “... ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”
Anyway, the halibut does. He is as sweet as adversity all right. And he wears in that plug-ugly, flat head of his a meat whose taste defies accurate description but is a cross between the tenderest lean and the most opulent fat, between milk and honey, and better than both combined. It is one more instance of the ugly-duckling motif in a world where one should never judge by appearances.
People prize the toothsomeness of halibut. But the parts of him they cat are the parts of his gross body, laminated layers of lean tissue that taste about as much like the lean fat marvel of his head as white-pine shavings taste like the breast of a this-year's plover. People eat the southern hemisphere of a fish that wears an Eden for the apex of his northern. They eat plain stalk, pure lumber. The flower of this fish is his triangular headpiece.
So, whenever January winds blow and the driven show heaps up its vast wind roses around the walls of my house. I am back instantly to my boyhood on that old island farm where I was raised. I am sitting in the kitchen in the middle of the odor of the roasted heads of my father's halibut. And my vigor and youth return to me.
Those midwinter nights are among the sweetest nights I remember. I knew well what delight was a-making. For in the afternoon my mother had sent me out to the woodshed to spear up for her with a pitchfork three-four halibut heads from the hogshead they were frozen in.
My father bought the heads by the hogshead wholesale from Boston, and he left them out there in the woodshed to freeze up solid and keep through the winter. Five hogsheads were his margin of safety. A hard winter should have more. My father got the heads cheap. For even that early, degeneration in eating had set in; people had begun to shy away from the fish heads of their fathers and to eat only the bodies, on the downward way to their present complete obsession with vitamins and fondness far electrocuted pulpwoods. So, for a song almost, my sire was able to lay in enough barrels of heads to keep a big and growing family in muscle and mirth all winter long. Then was lift by the barrel there in our woodshed.
I knew what was up those bright January days. I brought in the halibut heads, stiff as planks with crystals of frost, and my mother thawed them out in running water, dug out their salt, cold eyes, trimmed off their gills, scaled the skin with the carving knife, put them into her deep bake-pan greased over with pork fat and with just enough water to cover their lowest levels, and clapped them into hex hot oven in the midafternoon. She crisscrossed the fish heads with long strips of salt pork, the touchstone of all fine New England cookery. The Plymouth Rock of salt pig was the foundation of this roasted meat of Eden. It put the salt sea back into the fish, and it brought out and pointed up the flavor of wisdom in those deep-sea heads. My mother ran up to go with them a bag of stuffing made of stale cracker crumbs mixed in milk with chopped onion, salt and pepper, sage, and bayberry leaves. She painted the heads of the fish with a paste of flour and corn meal and salt.
Then my mother crowded the stove full of beechwood and sat back in her rocker and let pork and ocean and nature have their way in the soft, fierce radiation of beech. All through the afternoon, the heady aroma of halibut spread through the iron door of the oven, through the plaster and laths of the kitchen walls, through the zero air on Lost Paradise Farm, through the thick spruces of Back Cove, and into our marrow as we slid down Old Orchard Hill on our sleds. I swear we could smell that halibut savor way off there in the January afternoon that blazed like an old Sandwich plate. I know I could, for I smell it yet, through all these fifty years!
When the sun's golden cartwheel rolled low on earth and slanted down through the spruces, we came home all hollow with hunger. The stars were beginning to come out over us. our feet crunched on the snow, the lamplight came out the farmhouse windows to meet us, and we trooped into the kitchen, breathing clouds of frost from our quivering noses. The halibut heads were brought smoking from the oven, we boys and girls fell into our phalanxes on each side of the table, and my mother ladled out the meat.
The meat had to be ladled. For lo! a miracle had happened. The three-four fish heads had melted together, flesh had slid from bone, and there was a brown pudding to be spooned into our plates. a pudding with the smell of holiday upon it. What we bit into was not fat. lean, gristle, or gravy. It was all these at once, and all these transfigured. It was hot. and it was heaven. There was a tacky white substance, like powdered milk, all shot through the mess. Even the bones were edible and delicious. They had softened, and we took them up in our fingers and crunched and chewed deep into them to get the honey of the sea out of their every pore. The smaller children greased their faces and noses and bodies till they looked like infant Eskimos at a Bering Sea picnic. And there was not one of us who finished the meal without a glistening chin.
When we had got down to the last bones of our feast, we had enough fire of life in us to take us through the next day. stacking up the cordwood in the beethwoods or coasting down Misery Hill and out across the bay a hundred times. We were full of hear and heartiness which not even a twemy-belowzero day could make a dent in. We were pure liquid lire.
Suppose now you catch fire from this boyhood flame I write about It will be next to impossible for you nowadays to match that old feast we had. I know. I have tried. You go down to the fish market and say you want to buy a halibut bead. The man there will smile and shake his head. He will tell you that halibut heads are no longer on the market. Good reason why. They are all bought up instantly in Boston or in Gloucester on their arrival there from the sea. The minute the catch comes in, agents of the makers of vitamin pills or of cod-liver oil and cod emulsions for babies and old folks snatch up every head. The rich oil in the halibut's headpiece goes into bottled sunshine and potions and pills that keep dark winter days full of sunshine.
But when I was a boy, I wallowed in that sunshine openly and directly and smacked my lips over that sunlight from twenty fathoms down in the Atlantic, over the roasted halibut heads that came to our salt-water farm table with gaiety and lights around them like the majestic boar's heads of the medieval manor hall.