A bird in the hand
WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT CHICKENS?
It would be a double blow, of course. I don’t know about you, but, right up there with the incredible egg (smirk), chicken is hands-down my favourite ingredient when a) I don’t feel like cooking; b) I feel like cooking; c) I want to cook something new; d) I want to make something flopproof; e) I want something comforting; f ) I need to feed the masses; g) I want leftovers… I could go on.
Chicken is one of those fallback ingredients that, no matter how convinced you are that you’re bored with it, if you see a new recipe for a crispy, juicy, spicy, crumbed, stuffed, curried, fried or roasted bird, it’s impossible not to think “I must try that.” A chicken is the perfect canvas for creativity, and don’t even get me started on the eggs (p 18).
A few years ago, before we had
The Cherub, The Salad Dodger and I made a memorable trip to France with my sister and her Prodigious Baker. The four of us went barging up the Saône river, from Branges to Gray in Burgundy, stopping at a different village each day, following the farmer’s markets. Now this was the land of the poulets de Bresse, the famously superior chickens of the region, and so every market had a mobile rotisserie cart selling racks of golden butter-basted birds with new potatoes roasted in the drippings. We’d buy them wrapped in brown paper and take them back to the barge to carve up and eat with fresh baguettes, heirloom tomatoes and artisanal cheese. The Salad Dodger still talks about those chicken carts.
There’s a reason the Great Hot Food & Rotisserie Chicken Ban was one of lockdown level 5’s most controversial restrictions. It’s simple: the people love chicken.
Without even trying too hard, I can measure out my life in chicken dinners: roast chicken at Chez Panisse; teasmoked and deep-fried at RedFarm in New York; Nigel Slater’s lemon-andbasil sticky chicken thighs (the dish I have probably made the most often in my life), a whole foie gras-stuffed bird for two at The Ivy in London; fried chicken and waffles at midnight in a pine forest full of Little Giggers; my Nana’s Sunday roast with stuffing; crazy-hot jerk chicken in Styrofoam boxes at the Notting Hill Carnival … There is no contest – chicken is my soul food.
I’m slightly ashamed to say that
I only recently learned how to spatchcock a chicken. It’s been lifechanging. For me, obviously, not for the chicken. When you need supper in a hurry and have a whole bird on hand, flattening it means it will roast faster and be easier to carve. It also means you can cook it on top of delicious things like cooked polenta mixed with mashed roast butternut, or smear it with the curry paste of your choice and roast it in a bath of chicken stock, spices and basmati rice for a fragrant one-pan oven curry that could be on the cover of a magazine (p 112).
When I need to feel comforted, I make chicken stock. My go-to hangover cure, a gift from The Salad Dodger, is a Woolies’ rotisserie chicken, pulled apart and eaten, still warm, on a Portuguese roll with sliced, fresh tomato and lots of mayonnaise. When I know I have a tough week of deadlines, I roast two chickens on a Sunday evening for dinner and make a ragù with the leftovers – a creamy sauce sweetened with leeks to toss through tagliatelle, or top with a layer of puff pastry for a midweek pie.
If I have a chicken on standby, I feel like things will be okay. And then, magically, they always are.
“Without even trying too hard, I can measure out my life in chicken dinners”