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Authors: Novella Carpenter
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down my shirt. Since I had moved to California from Seattle, watermelons had held a special cachet for me. They are native to Africa and require heat to develop. The Pacific Northwest just didn’t have it. In Oakland, I had so far mastered hot-weather-loving plants like tomatoes, hot peppers, and corn. This was my chance to do melons.
For a week, I had gone out every day to water and stare at the dirty black piles, to see if anything was emerging. On day three, I thought I saw some green, but it was just a piece of trapped grass. On day five, I sprinkled the mounds with fish kelp fertilizer and suppressed the urge to dig in to see exactly what was going on down there. Eight days had now passed, and I cursed the seed company, birds, bad horse manure, ants, and any other suspects who could be blamed for preventing the watermelons’ germination.
I pawed through the dirt to find some potato bugs for the ducks. In four weeks, the ducks and one of the goslings had made it to full feather. (The other gosling died quietly in the brooder one night for no apparent reason.) Because they had grown so quickly and had such wet, fly-attracting turds, I had moved them outdoors much sooner than the chicks, into a pen I built out of chicken wire and milk crates. I had even made them a small pond—a washtub sunk into the dirt and filled with water.
A few feet from the pen was a chain-link fence, and behind that was a duplex—a cobbled-together adobe affair—where many people lived. My favorite residents there were a woman named Neruda and her nine-year-old daughter, Sophia. When I first put the ducks out into the yard, Sophia watched from behind the fence, too shy to say anything. After a few days, she spent more and more time lurking and watching the birds’ antics. One day I invited Neruda and her daughter over.
The ducks—Pekins, a popular breed of meat duck from China—were almost fully grown by then. They had glossy white feathers and sturdy orange bills. The surviving gosling had turned into a stately gray goose. We sat in the sun and watched the ducks play. Sophia picked up one of the lily-white birds and gently set him in the “pond.” He quacked happily and bobbed his head in and out of the water.
“Is he like a pet dog?” she asked me suddenly.
I glanced at her mom. Cornered.
“Not really,” I said, feeling like a monster. While Sophia had been playing with the ducks, I had been thinking about duck confit and Christmas goose.
In fact, I had been studiously avoiding the thought of killing, focusing instead on the first few sections of Storey’s Guide to Raising Ducks, which told me how to install a pond and what to feed the growing flock. I hadn’t gotten to the butchering section of the guide yet. Nor had I yet gone to Willow’s farm to find out how she killed her ducks. Next to Storey’s Guide on my nightstand was Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. I read with keen interest her many good ideas for cooking duck livers and making canard rôti au four .
But how do you tell a child you’re going to cut off this adorable duck’s head, pluck its white feathers, and roast it in an oven, letting its fat naturally baste the meat? Children, I’ve found, don’t care much about haute cuisine. So I looked into Sophia’s innocent chocolate-colored eyes and mumbled something about eggs and breeding. Yes, I straight-up lied.
After Sophia went home, I sat in the lot and looked at the ducks. There was an unmistakable gap in my knowledge of these creatures, right there in between the raising and the cooking. I knew how to raise them, and I knew how to cook them. How to get from a living duck to a duck ready to go in the oven—that was the trick. Not only did I not have the physical, practical know-how; I didn’t know how to prepare myself mentally, either. I suspected that there wasn’t a single book that could fill the gap between Storey’s Guide and Elizabeth David.
While the chickens and turkeys
For a week, I had gone out every day to water and stare at the dirty black piles, to see if anything was emerging. On day three, I thought I saw some green, but it was just a piece of trapped grass. On day five, I sprinkled the mounds with fish kelp fertilizer and suppressed the urge to dig in to see exactly what was going on down there. Eight days had now passed, and I cursed the seed company, birds, bad horse manure, ants, and any other suspects who could be blamed for preventing the watermelons’ germination.
I pawed through the dirt to find some potato bugs for the ducks. In four weeks, the ducks and one of the goslings had made it to full feather. (The other gosling died quietly in the brooder one night for no apparent reason.) Because they had grown so quickly and had such wet, fly-attracting turds, I had moved them outdoors much sooner than the chicks, into a pen I built out of chicken wire and milk crates. I had even made them a small pond—a washtub sunk into the dirt and filled with water.
A few feet from the pen was a chain-link fence, and behind that was a duplex—a cobbled-together adobe affair—where many people lived. My favorite residents there were a woman named Neruda and her nine-year-old daughter, Sophia. When I first put the ducks out into the yard, Sophia watched from behind the fence, too shy to say anything. After a few days, she spent more and more time lurking and watching the birds’ antics. One day I invited Neruda and her daughter over.
The ducks—Pekins, a popular breed of meat duck from China—were almost fully grown by then. They had glossy white feathers and sturdy orange bills. The surviving gosling had turned into a stately gray goose. We sat in the sun and watched the ducks play. Sophia picked up one of the lily-white birds and gently set him in the “pond.” He quacked happily and bobbed his head in and out of the water.
“Is he like a pet dog?” she asked me suddenly.
I glanced at her mom. Cornered.
“Not really,” I said, feeling like a monster. While Sophia had been playing with the ducks, I had been thinking about duck confit and Christmas goose.
In fact, I had been studiously avoiding the thought of killing, focusing instead on the first few sections of Storey’s Guide to Raising Ducks, which told me how to install a pond and what to feed the growing flock. I hadn’t gotten to the butchering section of the guide yet. Nor had I yet gone to Willow’s farm to find out how she killed her ducks. Next to Storey’s Guide on my nightstand was Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. I read with keen interest her many good ideas for cooking duck livers and making canard rôti au four .
But how do you tell a child you’re going to cut off this adorable duck’s head, pluck its white feathers, and roast it in an oven, letting its fat naturally baste the meat? Children, I’ve found, don’t care much about haute cuisine. So I looked into Sophia’s innocent chocolate-colored eyes and mumbled something about eggs and breeding. Yes, I straight-up lied.
After Sophia went home, I sat in the lot and looked at the ducks. There was an unmistakable gap in my knowledge of these creatures, right there in between the raising and the cooking. I knew how to raise them, and I knew how to cook them. How to get from a living duck to a duck ready to go in the oven—that was the trick. Not only did I not have the physical, practical know-how; I didn’t know how to prepare myself mentally, either. I suspected that there wasn’t a single book that could fill the gap between Storey’s Guide and Elizabeth David.
While the chickens and turkeys
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