Chicken Hearts

How a bloody bag of offal shook my faith in the City

Chicken hearts are an oft-discarded, oft-forgotten part of the animal. In the Western world, hearts are typically destined for pet food. I would gather most of you have never eaten one. As the organ’s function dictates, hearts are tough and muscly and have a distinctive smack of iron. But with the proper treatment, they can also be pleasantly bouncy and savory.

Giblets is the term for all the edible things inside of a chicken. They were a common sighting throughout my childhood. Stir-fried livers and gizzards, swimming in sauce were thanks to a grandmother that cooked at the intersection of Japanese and Taiwanese cuisine. She assured me these were delicious things. I didn’t particularly relish them. But when I accidentally became the chef and founder of a restaurant that married a Chinese takeout counter to a Southern fried chicken joint, I began to see bridges between the two cuisines thanks to my childhood dinner table. Liberal applications of pork fat, garlic and peppers everywhere, sesame seeds and a thoughtful dedication to chilies to name a few parallels. And both cuisines have a lot of love for giblets. When I worked on a recipe for mashed potatoes, giblet gravy seemed to open a window between both worlds.

Mashed Potatoes with Chicken Heart Gravy

They’re pretty classic mashed potatoes. Not smooth and airy like pommes puree but with a comparable ratio of dairy fat. They’re intentionally chunky and they’re a reliable vehicle for sauces. The giblet gravy is white-presenting, a traditional Southern gravy made with roux and chicken stock. But it’s colored with dark soy sauce (老抽), carpet-bombed with cracked black pepper and enlivened with lots of malt vinegar. We then fold in lots of chopped chicken hearts. Oh and big Frank Costello handfuls of chicken bouillon powder or as I like to call it, “MSG with a Master’s”¹

I like that dish. It feels representative of what Pecking House is. And I’m not alone, the demand for it was so great that we had to bench it. It was singlehandedly causing catastrophic logistical quandaries.

But there were other reasons I retired them. Even rustic mashed potatoes require a dogged commitment to technique to be great. They were commanding way too much of my bandwidth. And I was also really sick of looking at sad chicken hearts.

The hearts we got showed up in vacuum sealed bags that had lost their vacuum, so the packaging looked like a dirty, ill-fitting sweatshirt. It was nigh-irrefutable evidence that they were frozen² and likely thrown into a truck. The broken bags exuded pinkish juices which then left me with a soggy cardboard box. I removed the hearts from the box with the sort of caution one has when fishing something out of the toilet. Making a face is practically required.

And then there’s the cooking phase. I like to confit my chicken hearts, which is a fancy term for “drowned in and cooked slowly in fat”. This gives the perception of tenderness and moistness, qualities that are sorely needed in chicken hearts. And this technique gives you a forgiving window for doneness, it’s challenging to overcook things when making a confit. Which is good. Because when chicken hearts are overcooked, they become so tough and rubbery you could load them into a shotgun and disperse a college protest.

After the hearts have bubbled away in the oven covered with aluminum foil, I peel back the foil, et voila, a grisly sight of cloudy cooking oil and what I can only describe as gunk awaits me. These hearts were not only frozen, they were likely frozen thoughtlessly and have thus suffered maximal cellular damage. So a great deal of … stuff has been coaxed out. And I think the gunk speaks to the slaughtering conditions. It’s a common misconception that the red juices from meat are blood. They aren’t. Meat contains a protein called myosin. Myosin plus water equals red liquid. Even though it isn’t blood, bleeding animals properly is still critically important — it improves the eating quality and shelf-life of all the vertebrates we consider to be food. As gruesome as the imagery is, you have to bleed animals while their heart is still pumping. Say it with me now, proper exsanguination requires mechanical action. These hearts are probably so gunky because the chickens weren’t bled thoroughly. This gives the blood time to coagulate and leave some baggage behind.

It was our protocol to wash or hose the gunk off the cooked hearts afterwards because I found it so unappealing. I didn’t want to risk any chance of that stuff ending up in the gravy. And then that kind of defeated the purpose of cooking them confit style in the first place. And then as I’m tasting these unseasoned, fibrous masses I’m wondering why the hell am I doing this at all if I don’t love the product I’m working with.

Chicken heart gravy was, as we say in restaurants, 86’d. Ended, terminated, finished. You can 86 a tuna special, you can 86 a bottle of whiskey, you can even 86 a human — professionally, emotionally or literally. It’s an incredibly versatile verb.

I only allowed the dish to resurface for special occasions when I could control the variables better. Despite in-person protestations and Instagram comments requesting that the mashed potatoes return, which really tested my people pleasing curse of a personality, I declined to bring them back. I balked every time I pictured unwrapping that hot, steamy hotel pan.

Then I went to London.

For the second time ever, ya boy is cooking overseas (the first time is still too sensitive a topic). I have a loving relationship with British chefs. I’ve worked with dozens of them. I consider a couple of them my best friends in the world. They are, generally speaking, well-trained, have dauntless work ethics, are entertaining under pressure and could withstand beatings with admirable stoicism. Whenever I was given my lashings from Le Chef I was unable to hide my emotions. The humiliation, the hurt, the anger were written all over my face. If there was a common denominator to the Brits I worked with, they could be on the receiving end of one of the most vicious public displays of culinary rage I’ve ever seen, say “Oui, Chef” and carry on as if they just had a polite misunderstanding.

Was this talent for repression going to have consequences down the road for their most important relationships? Probably. But in the time requirements of a dinner service, it’s very useful.

They are tough and old school in all the ways chefs admire.

And they loved letting American chefs with liberal arts degrees and culinary school educations know it. There was always a bit of shit talk. A quote verbatim that has stuck with me for years;

“American produce is shit and so are the cooks.”

You’ve got hear it in received pronunciation for the full effect.

But even just one week into my Great British cooking experience and I have to say — they’ve got a point.

My recipes are built for speed, not for comfort. Not a lot of chefs with fine dining pedigrees think this way, but I write menus with heavy consideration of the conditions that await me. Am I going to be in a field kitchen with a Bunsen burner and a picnic bench? Is there a grocery store nearby that will have a selection of vinegar that isn’t in the cleaning aisle? Does this event coordinator sound like a total dipshit and is giving me unreliable information? Those sorts of things.

You can imagine what sort of menu I’d write for an overseas cooking excursion. Simple, reliable and counting on ingredients I am absolutely positive exist in abundance in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Gem lettuce, breakfast radishes, potatoes. Proper British ingredients.

Except they feel … different.

The gem lettuces are noticeably heavy for their size. When you take a bite, they make that exaggerated crunch you hear in commercials of white women laughing with salads. Not that the Brits would know anything about this, but the lettuces feel as if Mahomes could launch one 50 yards with a tight spiral. When you cut them open they are blindingly green. It can’t be the legendary British sunlight playing tricks with my eyes. Perhaps these leafy greens have adapted to the moody weather and developed chloroplasts that function like PEDs.

The buttermilk here is thick. Just to clarify, buttermilk is the runoff from making cultured butter. The byproduct from sweet butter is watery and insipid. Americans don’t really have much appreciation for cultured butter. After all, we are the country that invented I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. We are desperate to trick ourselves into eating less fat without making meaningful lifestyle changes that would allow us to just embrace the right fats occasionally. Instead, we’d rather, in defiance of God, machinate an always spreadable emulsion of corn oil and butter flavoring because government subsidies. Corn-is-king-but-actually-a-welfare-all-caps-YAS-QUEEN. But I digress. The buttermilk in England, thanks to a society utterly reverent of dairy and the cows that produce it, is thick, tangy and delicious. If you sprinkled granola on it the granola would not sink. Its displacement would be perfectly buoyed.

The potatoes and varieties thereof are endless. I was seconds away from stopping a cook from peeling red-skinned potatoes and telling them those were the wrong kinds for mashed. But they gave it one swipe of the peeler and a creamy, yellow interior was revealed. What’s this? The only red-skinned potatoes in the States are ghostly white and waxy. They make for a mediocre mash. But these produced a golden, luscious mash. I asked what they were called. The Red Duke of York. They give their potatoes stately names here.

And then there were the chicken hearts. I wanted to give this dish one more try in a more controlled environment. Maybe I could find inspiration again in the puddles of hot, herbaceous cream. Perhaps it had been long enough. I could barely picture the curdled proteins or smell the metallic waft in my Brooklyn kitchen.

I looked at a bag hand-delivered by an Englishman in a butcher’s coat with consternation. I remembered the sticky, floppy bags and the pools of meat juice. I began to dread the whole process — washing, cooking, washing again, trimming, chopping. How laborious and unpleasant.

Only this time, I had unwrapped a present. There were four bags of hearts, one kilo each, shrink-wrapped and clear as a window. Inside, little chicken hearts, thimble-sized. Blushing pink and supple. These had never been frozen. I cut open a bag. Odorless. Meat can often have a funk, especially if it’s a processed cut. Even the greatest restaurants in the world get meat this way. But not here. The bag hissed with a sharp inhale when I pierced it. The hearts had a moistness without excess exudation.

I cooked them. I covered the hearts with oil, let them slowly tick away on an induction burner. I fished one out. I usually sliced the merest sliver to test if they were cooked. I patted one dry, cooled it down, trimmed off the vena cava, and unquestioningly popped it whole into my mouth.

It was yielding. It still had the spring and bouncy texture of chicken hearts but it also was decidedly tender. It had minerality rather than iron. It was meaty and dark but in all the ways we want offal to be. I turned the stove off to let them cool.

I stood in place and stared off into the distance. My brain was sprinting through a long list of analysis and I was outwardly catatonic. My partner thinks this loading screen look is hilarious because it is such a dramatically pensive state for what is typically me gestating an idea for a sandwich. But that little hourglass in my brain was turning furiously today.

The hearts were delivered by a middle-aged white man in a butcher’s coat. He had a friendly and familiar rapport with the chef de cuisine. So he seems to do this regularly and has intimate knowledge of the product he’s delivering. The overwhelming majority of truck drivers in New York City are young and underpaid black and Latino men. At least in NYC, white American men don’t really do low-paying physical labor. I challenge anyone living here to let me know the last time you saw a white American dude deliver your Amazon package, pick you up in an Uber or bring you your pizza. Of course, the British practically invented systemic racism but it seems they are a bit farther ahead towards creating a more egalitarian and supportive society. In America, it feels like we took a baby step from literal slavery to wage slavery.³

This British fellow is likely someone invested in the business. Perhaps it is even the owner himself. It seems likely that he is part of a small scale operation that is focused on high quality and having intimate relationships with good restaurants. He probably isn’t trying to streamline a massive hangar of trucking logistics. And everything would suggest he is making enough to make ends meet. And the business is charging slightly less than what I pay for chicken back home.

I thought the whole point of corporatization was unbeatable prices?

The hearts were still tightly under vacuum. Even the best vacuum packaging falters with time. Frozen products expand and squirm as their water content crystallizes. Hearts are not a popular part of the chicken. This is an understandable compromise. My assumption in the States is that poultry suppliers will freeze a few hundred pounds on the off-chance they can offload it. And then maybe there’s a big pet food farm in the sky that they sell the rest to. After a few months, they will evaluate if it’s worth the freezer space. If there’s a request for hearts, someone looks up a SKU code, yanks a few bags out of the freezer and slams them onto a truck. But here in London, all signs point to the order of operations being different. These hearts were freshly packaged and freshly sourced. A chef had a conversation with a butcher, not a sales rep. They requested an uncommon product and the butcher set it aside for them instead of pulling from a murky inventory.

The hearts cooked cleanly. There was no gunk. The chickens likely had good slaughtering conditions. As previously mentioned, proper exsanguination requires a still-beating heart. That means chickens were probably stabilized, killed and bled in a controlled environment as opposed to run through a slaughtering saw like a belt-fed machine gun. I can’t know for sure but it seems there was thoughtfulness put into how the chickens were killed. This greatly increases the chances the conditions were humane.

The hearts were tender. We have plenty of research that correlates emotional stress to arterial scarring and coronary plaque in humans. True, your average broiler chicken lives for about 42 days, but I don’t think it’s a huge, inferential leap to say that better living conditions leads to less cellular damage. In fact, we’ve known this for millennia. Stress, especially in death, negatively affects the quality of the meat. A good hunter was able to deliver a quick and clean death. It wasn’t until we domesticated these poor beasts did we learn we could do far, far better (but usually don’t).⁴

At the risk of sounding like the girl who studied abroad for a semester and is now pronouncing Barcelona with the lisp, I was immediately excited to once again serve Mashed Potatoes with Chicken Heart Gravy.

And then almost as suddenly, I was crestfallen.

I would, of course, have to go home to New York City.

Oh New York. How I have loved thee and given so much to thee. But it’s hard not to see us as having a toxic relationship now. Not unlike the relationships I have with the rest of my family. I am turning a blind eye to all the ways you have changed or not changed. But we are perhaps growing apart and sitting sullenly at the dinner table. I feel obligated, for some reason, to stay. And you punish me intensely for attempting to set my boundaries.

Perhaps this was inevitable. I had a rose-colored adolescence sequestered in the Upper West Side. Even more narrowly, the particularly wealthy and beautiful enclave of Lincoln Center. I spent every weekend there loathing my training as a classical musician. But a chance to be plugged into the stream of humanity that was Manhattan made it worth it. Riding the L.I.R.R. with my cello, navigating Penn Station with it as my shield, I stepped onto the 9 train, may she rest in peace, and it was a portal to the world I so wanted to be a part of. I had nothing but contempt for living in Long Island where every human interaction happened between the bubble of a Mercedes-Benz.

There was real life at every corner in the City; the clamor of the train, the tragedy of the panhandler, the smells of seared meat and car fumes. Roasting candied nuts and urine alike. It’s really weird but if you grow up here, start off low to the ground, you can quickly differentiate between canine and human urine, the latter somehow more repulsive. It instinctively makes you walk on tip-toed steps. Though logic would dictate that piss is piss. The City was real and gritty unlike the suburban diorama I was confined to. There were hardened lifers, scrappy survivalists that kept the City functioning. They were eccentric and authentic in a way that I always admired. And there were attractive, ambitious people, all similarly here to be the best at what they were. People who were here to deprioritize everything else in their life to chase a dream. Even if for a moment. It was the tension between these two energies that gave the City its unique heartbeat. The frenetic, giddy chase for greatness contrasted against the plodding, tired thrum of carving an existence. Privilege juxtaposed against misfortune, lofty aspirations bumping heads with reality, evergreen optimism against old growth practicality. As someone who was desperate to be seen and to escape a cheerless life at home, this was where I felt I had to be. To use a tired platitude, anything felt possible. And anything would also be that much more deserved and hard-earned if you should persevere. My preferred quote about New York, that I feel can encapsulate the verve from every strata;

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” - John Updike

This is where you went to be on the global stage. Being in New York immediately meant being important. And boy was I desperate to feel important to someone if not everyone. There was being the best elsewhere and there was being the best here, and there was an ocean between the two. And you could do it. You just had to be tough enough and good enough.

So I trained. I sacrificed. I chased. Ten years flew by in the multitude of 12 hour days in windowless basement kitchens.

But perhaps I had my head down for too long to realize. I’ve come out of my penitent training to find the world different from when I went in.

The obstacles to thriving here have now become untenable. The game was always rigged, but at least the game had the good sense to give you a win here and there to keep you playing. Even a slot machine knows that. But it is now so obviously unwinnable that without a massive head start and the most luxurious of cushions, it’s hard to see the point anymore. And that’s why every restaurant that opens is usually progeny from an already successful brand. Generational wealth remains one of New York City’s most impactful industries.

I’d at least respect that if they were churning out innovative and exciting concepts, but it seems that most of these restaurants are simply “the best” by being purposefully withholding and exclusive. And for churning ludicrous amounts of cash. Few operators are doing something that hasn’t been seen already. If anything, they are proud of being derivative. Brand identity. I present a summary of the headlines from the last couple years;

“Yet Another Storied Neighborhood Touchstone Fails to Renegotiate Lease with New Landlord — Its Future is Uncertain”

“Major Fuck You Restaurant Group Opens Another Modern Italian Eatery and You’ll Have to Pay Hundreds of Dollars for a Reservation”

"Restaurateur Spends Millions Researching a New Fried Chicken — Introducing Fried Chicken and Caviar”

“God-tier Sushi Chef Opens 10-Seat Omakase Counter But You Have to Be Sleeping with Someone from BlackRock to Get In”

It’s funny to me how New Yorkers consider anyone anything else a rube yet they rush to the same predictable consumption habits over and over again. And it’s also funny that the brands taking over the City are barely different from those in that Deep Red South we like to poke fun of. They’re just more expensive. Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s and Wing Stop are taking more territory than Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville. 7th Street Burger and Blank Street Coffee are crop dusting the City with venture capitalist mediocrity faster than your fire escape tomatoes will ripen this summer.

And that cycle won’t be broken anytime soon because the barrier to entry here is now insurmountable. Who is going to go through the misery of raising the millions of dollars required to try something new and uncertain? Who is going to take that big of a risk? And let’s say someone does, the realities of the business are going to bring you down fast. The absurd rent is the axe hanging over your head each month. You’re going to need to figure out how to boost revenue. Which means you’re going to need to hire more people, open for more hours, pay for more monopolized utilities, buy cheaper more abundant ingredients, then there’s less for you so you’ve got to open more restaurants. It is never enough. There is no such thing as contentment in the Vatican of capitalism. Europe may have the curiosity of nipping the tallest poppy, but here we have the problem of endlessly manicuring your nether region while pulling out different tape measures hoping the thing has grown.⁵

And it’s becoming tiresome to run a restaurant 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, 364 days a year only for people to keep walking in the door and asking if we have Peking duck or ask if I could please cook my famous Korean fried chicken at their event.⁶ It adds coarse, flaky salt to the wound of an already bifurcated society so obviously disadvantaged towards people of color. At least in London, restaurants all seem to be closed two days a week and most of them do dinner only. And they are still able to make it all function while I’m over here redlining the space for all she’s got. It would make the ignorance more palatable.

And it’s becoming tiresome to order ingredients of unknown provenance through what is basically an Amazon shopping cart and to never even meet your sales rep. Forget talking about meeting the farmer. Unless you’re the Scarecrow of Pocantico Hills, crossbreeding perfect specimens of spinach with a Rockefeller estate at your disposal, you aren’t getting any particularly special products to work with. At least not without shelling out big, big bucks. You get life-giving inspiration when you see beautiful ingredients come through the door. But those moments lose their luster quickly when they’re attached to unmanageable price tags. It’s like getting approached by the most beautiful woman in the bar only for her to whisper in your ear after the first drink that her lovin’ ain’t for free.⁷

And it’s becoming tiresome to see crumbling infrastructure, widening wealth inequality, a city ravaged by mental illness and runaway inflation when you have to cut a check to the guy who once unlocked the building for the tenant for the guy with the Stern degree that’s managing the property for the guy who’s father bought the building in the days of when this city felt hopeful. Endless mouths to feed, all part of the grossly massive real estate pie baked by owners, brokers, lawmakers and agents. Rents are insanely high so wages have to be really high. Wages have to be really high so the cost of goods and services have to be really high. And round and round we go.

Yeah, you’re right, I should consider what my version of a chicken parmigiana hero is.

I suppose it’s been sitting in my chest. Maybe this is a me problem. Maybe I’m just not that good. I could accept that. And maybe it’s about getting older and more cynical. Which is tough because I started life pretty cynical. Maybe this is trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. I may be tired of fighting to fit in. If conformity is required to thrive here, then I would choose elsewhere. That famous bar scene from Good Will Hunting feels apropos. The Harvard grad student pulls the ace of having more material success when called out for being uninspired.

“You’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.”

“Yeah, maybe! But hey, at least I won’t be unoriginal.”

Everywhere has its problems but perhaps I need to find a place that has the right problems for me. And at least be happy about the chicken hearts I see in the restaurant.

-E-

1. A Master’s Degree in the sense that it’s not absolutely necessary and most people would never notice the difference, but it is still irrevocably an upgrade. And to be clear, not an MBA. MSG with an MBA, i.e. something that networked, got drunk for two years then tries to tell you they’re better than you and more deserving of your money? Why we call that Momofuku Seasoned Salt.

2. I’m not necessarily a “fresh always greater than frozen” type of chef. I think it’s important to consider a great deal of factors when sourcing ingredients and the application of said ingredients. And this is only a footnote because I support critical thinking and nuance. There are no binaries in life, you can start with negotiating your relationship with fresh vs. frozen.

3. Yes, I know there are poor white men all over this country struggling to uplift themselves out of very challenging circumstances and they take issue with my observations. But I would remind you of what LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson, not LeBron James in case that wasn’t clear) said about the Jim Crow South, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

4. Shout out to Dr. Temple Grandin, you a real one.

5. It hasn’t.

6. I am not Korean and neither is my chicken.

7. I 1000% support consensual sex work but in this economy?