Butter, cream, more butter

Given that I am studying traditional french cuisine, I should not be surprised by the amount of butter and cream employed in each dish. I am, however, slightly nauseated. I realize that this training is an excellent base to have, but it has made me realize how multi-cultural and, for lack of a better word, modern, my own cooking style has turned out to be. It is actually nice to realize that I actually have a style at all.
So today we were given dead chickens with the heads, feet and innards still attached. I am usually not squirmish in the kitchen (except when it comes to beef tongue, which I associate with a childhood trauma), but that's probably because I am not often in a situation which calls for me to be in close contact with animal heads and innards. Still, I called on the inner igorot in me to face the bird and my own aversion.
A little note on igorots for those who are not familiar with the term, which denotes a tribe from the Mountain Province of the Philippines, where I was born. I was thus nicknamed igorot early in my life, in a slightly pejorative (from a Manila or plain-as in flatland- people's perspective) yet tender manner, which I always took pride in, at first simply because of the otherness of its resonance, but later in life because of the anti-colonial implications. The Mountain Province were able to conserve their rituals and traditions more than the plains folk. One of these was a ritual chicken stew called pinikpikan and which involved tapping the head of a live chicken against a rock until it hemorraged internally. The whole process is absolutely inhumane, yet traditional and apparently makes for better tasting broth. I will not enter here into animal ethics, it's just something that came to my mind in class this morning looking at that dead chicken head...