How to Roast a Lamb by Michael Psilakis

Author:Michael Psilakis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: CKB101000
ISBN: 9780316071734
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-10-28T10:00:00+00:00

Blood shot out of the lamb like water from a high-pressure hose. The lamb started shaking and convulsing. I could feel an intense heat radiating out of its body, and I felt as though I was burning up. It all happened so quickly and yet, the way it seemed to me, I felt like it would never end.

I jumped off the lamb. I looked down at myself and saw that I was covered in blood. Now I was crying hysterically.

My father asked me, “Are you crying?”

This had always been a rhetorical question: in my family, men and boys didn’t cry. So “Are you crying?” had always been more of a warning: I should pull myself together because crying would be unacceptable. Instinctively, I tried to stop the tears from flowing. I turned away and swiped at my eyes and running nose, attempting to get a grip.

But on this day, my father was really asking me this question. I tried to answer and tell him I wasn’t crying. I didn’t want my tears to disappoint him. But he beckoned me over and pulled me up onto his lap, something he rarely did. Gently he asked, “Why are you crying?”

I sobbed that he had just killed my friend, and that I had helped him do it. My father explained that he wanted to illustrate something very important to me: that every year we put a lamb on the spit and every year we ate lamb at Easter. And here was the lesson. He asked me, “Where did you think that lamb came from?” My response was one of childlike innocence. “I don’t know,” I told him, sniffling.

I was still on my father’s lap. It was so unusual for him to hold me this way that I sensed I was about to be told something I would remember forever. Quietly and firmly, my father explained: “Michael, when Mommy cooks something for us to eat for dinner and it’s something you think you might not like because it’s a part of the animal you don’t like the sound of, think before you say you’re not going to eat it. Because when you reject that liver, tongue, or cheeks, you are essentially saying that this animal gave its life for nothing—this animal that someone else raised, cared for, and fed died for nothing because you don’t want to eat it. It is okay to be sad that the lamb is dead. Hold on to that sadness, because the taking of a life is never something to joke about. When you think about that lamb and what it gave up for us so that we could eat, you understand that we killed a living thing, and we must always respect and honor that animal by using everything it has to offer.”

I never forgot my father’s words. When I first started cooking in restaurant kitchens, I wanted to use every part of the animals I was butchering. I wanted to honor those animals that had given their lives so I could feed the people who came to eat the food I created.

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