Two sharp memories, separated by decades, converged last week to put a noteworthy roast chicken on my table.

The first memory goes back 27 years to my honeymoon in Puerto Rico. Dining on the patio of a former coffee plantation that had been converted to a country inn, my bride and I were served a simple roast chicken that was revelatory in its texture and taste. It was firm to the tooth, in a way that supermarket chickens back home weren’t, and its deep flavor made the usual suspects seem pallid by comparison.

Where had that chicken come from? The waiter smiled and pointed to the gaggle of chickens pecking around in the yard — one fewer than had started the day there. Ah, yes. That missing chicken was the freshest I’d ever eaten.

The more recent memory, around a year old, is of strolling past a west Harlem art gallery, Triple Candy, and suddenly, unexpectedly, inhaling a barnyard-like odor. It came from the open side door of the neatly painted building across the street. Called La Granja (1355 Amsterdam Ave. at 126th Street, 212-662-6773), it’s a live poultry market, also known as a vivero. I’ll never set foot in there, I thought, a tad squeamishly. When it came to buying chickens, I had always preferred the supermarket, or so I told myself at the time.

A few weeks ago, I came upon another vivero under an elevated train in Washington Heights. Inside, a woman was pointing to a large bird in a cage — a turkey, I think. At that moment, the advantage of a bird from such a poultry market seemed unassailable: It would be far fresher than anything I could buy at my neighborhood D’Agostino’s, but what about hygiene?

A spokeswoman at the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets, Jessica Chittenden, assured me that these markets, which she said serve the “tremendous ethnic demand for live poultry in the city,” are inspected quarterly to ensure that the premises and equipment are clean, and that the birds are disease-free.

So last week, in preparation for inviting over a friend for dinner the next evening, I headed to La Granja, where two Dominican women were waiting outside to avoid the smell of the market. “I always buy brown chickens, because that’s what we have on the farms at home,” one of the women said.

I walked in to find La Granja was chockablock with wheeled, multi-level cages. Stacked near the front door were large ducks, their webbed feet seemingly enormous. Above them were gray rabbits, then richly feathered guinea fowl and, topmost, small white pigeons. There were turkeys, two or three to a cage, and plenty of white and brown chickens. A few seemed comatose, their heads lolling, but most were lively. A couple of escapees skittered about in a corner.

I pointed to a strutter: white with a red cockscomb. An attendant scooped it up, swiftly bound its feet, and hung it upside down from a hanging scale. “Eight dollars,” he said, wiring a tag bearing number 232 to one leg of the six-pound chicken. The attendant took the squawking chicken to the rear, where the deed was done out of sight.

Fifteen minutes later, a cheerful young woman named Dani handed me a blue bag from a small window in the slaughtering room. “Marinate your chicken tonight and it will be tastier tomorrow,” she said.

Opening the bag at home, there was no mistaking this bird for a supermarket chicken: its clawed feet stuck out of the wrapping paper. I put them in a pot with the wings and neck to make a sweet-smelling broth for gravy.

Instead of my usual herbs and lemon seasoning, I tried out a Charlie Trotter recipe from the current issue of Wine Spectator, calling for a ginger and cumin rub. Once the bird had been thus anointed, it stayed in the refrigerator, as Dani had counseled, until it went into the oven the next evening. I served it with summer vegetables and a smooth Chianti Classico called Castello di Volpaia 2004. “This chicken is so meaty,” our guest said, recalling how, as a girl, she’d watch her grandmother use tweezers to pluck pinfeathers out of the skin of a freshly slaughtered chicken.

When I mentioned the vivero chicken to another friend the next day, she also had a memory of watching her grandmother cut up a cooked chicken with poultry shears. Just before the bird was carried to the table, her grandmother would give her a few choice morsels. That was a memory from Slovakia, still fresh after 80 years. Non-shrink-wrapped chicken, it seems, begets long-held memories.

With supermarket birds, I always discard the packet containing the organ meat, including the typically dull red, leathery liver. But this chicken’s liver was lustrous, even gleaming, and soft, so I pan-fried it with a bit of onion. A few nibbles of that delicacy made my daughter’s toy poodle one happy fellow.

It wasn’t only the chicken from La Granja that revalidated that abused term “farm fresh.” At the pickup window, I’d noticed a pile of eggs in various sizes on a counter. They’d come directly out of the slaughtered chickens, Dani explained. For $1, I bought 10 eggs, some of which were still warm. Arriving home at noon, I fried a single egg, sunny side up. The brilliant yellow yolk mounded, and the white had an extra pearly luster. Here was an egg so fresh that it hadn’t even been laid.