[Sca-cooks] Chickens in Hochee-

[Volker Bach]

Am Mittwoch, 1. Juni 2005 16:45 schrieb 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.

I'm not sold on the idea that it is purely based on theory. I've tried it 
(albeit admittedly with moder boxed birds) and the result is a much juicier 
and softer meat that retains a lot more fat (the parboiled chickens dripped 
hardly at all). This may have been explained in terms of humoral theory, but 
my money is on well above 50% plain experience in the mix. Was that what you 
mean by 'plain observation'?
I'll probably try it with a stewing chicken sometime soon to see what happens.

> > 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...

Absolutely. But every now and then I recall so much of our written evidence 
pertains to maybe 5% of the population... 

> > 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.

Could be. I've only had free-range once (it's not normally on the budget) and 
it wasn't very leathery, just pleasantly firm. But I wonder whether the many 
recipes for stewed chicken were not really intended for older, tougher birds 
(would a free-range laying hen, even an old one, really end up as played out 
as ours?)

Giano


	

	
		
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