A roast chicken fix in a former No Chickens Zone Karoo town

Twenty years ago I was told by someone in Calvinia in the Northern Cape: ‘You won’t find chicken in Calvinia, meneer. We don’t eat chicken here.’ And now here I was, back in the town, with a craving for roast chicken. Fortunately, luck was on my side

My days right now are all about writing, both for this food platform in Daily Maverick and my extracurricular scribblings. Unravelling the complexities of my past. Laying waste to childhood trauma.

And leavening my days while I write are thoughts of what I’ll reward myself with once the day is done. What I will make for my solitary supper.

This being the Hantam, red meat is what goes onto plates here. Calvinia is the capital of vleis. But after six nights of lamb, interspersed with one of pork, I needed roast chicken. I don’t know about you, but sometimes in my family, we need roast chicken. Me. Di. Rebecca. We’re all afflicted by it. Once in a while, it becomes imperative for us to have our roast chicken fix.

Meanwhile, in the heart of the Hantam Karoo, there is a Great Chicken Dearth.

But Calvinia is not like other towns where there are lots of packs of chicken breasts and thighs and legs in the fridge at the supermarket. And plump whole ones next to them. Once, about 20 years ago, I was writing a play in the Boekehuis and the Great Chicken Need struck me. There was not one chicken in town. Not one single drumstick. I asked someone at the Spar and she said: “You won’t find chicken in Calvinia, meneer. We don’t eat chicken here.”

Then, at the OK, someone else was saying much the same thing to me, but then said: “Hang on, meneer, let me check the freezer.” And right at the bottom in the corner was the tiniest, scrawniest chicken ever seen by the human eye. “Ja, but it’s free range,” she said, beaming.

It was free range. In the sense that it had run around somebody’s back yard desperately searching for something to eat, and after some days had died of exhaustion.

But my need was so great that I bought it anyway. It defrosted for the rest of the day, then went into a pot in the old black range in the kitchen of this writer’s house.

I’d like to say it cooked until it was tender, but I don’t like to lie. I checked the drawer for pliers to prise the meat off. I gave up and wrenched the powdery flesh off its withered carcass with my bare hands; it came away in dry strips that chewed like cardboard chews. I ate the potatoes and peas instead.

So, picture me at the same two shops in

There are a million and one ways to roast a chicken. But sometimes you just need to open the kitchen door and step outside, and entrust your supper to whatever’s in

front of you. I stepped outside and found lavender

Calvinia this week. Surely, by now, I had said to myself, two whole decades later, the chicken situation in this town can only have improved. Children have grown up and been to the

big cities, and

seen how people eat chicken there, and come home with tales of derring-do, pirates and chickens in the shops.

But, at the Spar, no chicken in the fridge at all. At the OK, same story. It’s Groundhog Day in Calvinia.

As I walk past the nearby freezer, something catches my eye. Not one, not two, not three, not four, but five chickens, frozen in time. Four are large, but one is small. A oneman chicken. (It’s smaller than it looks in the picture.)

The small one, however, was not frozen at all. It had only been put into the freezer minutes before I walked in.

That chicken was waiting for me. It was the chicken that was going to make me rethink my view of this town as a No Chickens Zone with a checkpoint where people check your boot and back seat for evidence of chicken.

Chicken normality was restored. And what’s more, this fowl was fresh, plump and had never seen a back yard.

There are a million and one ways to roast a chicken. But sometimes you just need to open the kitchen door and step outside, and entrust your supper to whatever’s in front of you. I stepped outside and found lavender.