[Sca-cooks] Chickens in Hochee-

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jun 1, 2005, at 9:53 AM, Volker Bach wrote:

> I can recall a number of recipes in which the instructions are to  
> first boil
> the chicken and then roast it. No statistics on hand, just a memory  
> flash.

Scully seems to think this could be about medico-humoral balance --  
add moisture and coolness to an otherwise fairly moderate food before  
subjecting it to drying and heating. To me, a lot of humoral stuff is  
simple [depending on POV] observation.

> But I would expect the majority of chickens in period to have been  
> pretty
> leathery birds. They were after all intended for laying eggs and  
> eaten only
> at the end of their useful lives.

Ee-ehhh... could we be generalizing? Oh, okay, see below...

> Today's habit of raising large numbers of
> grain-fed chooks for no other purpose than eventual slaughter must  
> have been
> limited to the upper classes back then.

Surely. Let's posit that poor people and farmers (yuh know...  
peasants?) were not raising birds exclusively for slaughter, but just  
as importantly, they weren't raising their birds in little boxes that  
restrict movement, feeding them chemicals to make them grow fast, and  
killing them in eight weeks. So while the standard having-reproduced  
country bird might be more leathery than its table-bred town  
counterpart, the premium young birds for upper-class tables might  
easily have been somewhat tougher than our grain-fed chooks. Which is  
why I thought maybe Kosher or free-range birds might be worth looking  
at as being perhaps closer to the chickens the original recipe intends.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04