[Sca-cooks] Chickens in Hochee-

[rbbtslyr]

Actually find a 2 or 3 year old rooster and you will have close to a period bird.  Spare Roosters and cockerls are what were generally cooked until a hen quit laying for good.  A hen can earn her keep up to 3 or 4 years before she lays fewer eggs than what is needed to cover her feed. The eggs tend to be fewer but larger. The same with domestic ducks. Often a cockerl or rooster is slaughtered for older dished fixed traditionally at 6 months to 2 years. Connective tissue equals flavor in sauced most of the older dishes would of used these birds.  A Rooster would go to the pot when a better one was born, cockerls as they will fight for hens and are only needed at 10 or 15 hens to 1 rooster for maxium fertil egg production, and about 25 to 1 still gives a reasonable rate.  Depending on where your dish is from you would want a Heavy Breed, or a Light Breed bird for you dish The Med had Light Breeds (mostly white egg layers) Northern Europe Dark eggs and there are a couple of breeds that go almost back to period but I wouldn't worry about finding a rare bird to cook but a general or double duty breed of one of those types would be a good choice.

I have RIR and Orps for eggs and meat, older cockerls at about 5 to 6 months my wonderful pies, stews and dumplings.

Kirk KA4PXK

Meddle not in the Affairs of Dragons, for thou art Chrunchy and Taste Good with Catsup or BBQ Sauce

Liberty Hill, SC Elevation 571 ft  

Liberty Hill, SC (Kershaw)
Longitude: 80° 48' 7" W (-80.8019°)
Latitude: 34° 28' 41" N (34.4781°)
Grid: EM94 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Phil Troy / G Tacitus Adamantius 
  To: Cooks within the SCA 
  Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 10:45 AM
  Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Chickens in Hochee-



  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


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