[Sca-cooks] Chickens in Hochee-

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jun 1, 2005, at 3:14 PM, Huette von Ahrens wrote:

>> 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
>>
>
> But what about capons?  There are a few recipes that call for  
> capons, which are castrated
> male chickens.  Capons apparently are much more tender and fat than  
> their fertile brothers.
> And what about pullets, which also are called for in recipes, which  
> are young chickens,
> usually females, which are less than one year old?  I am told that  
> they are very tender.
> And everyone knows that writers always crave that very special  
> recipe, called the Pullet
> Surprise. :-)

True, both capons and pullets can be very tender. But this is sort of  
the opposite version of an "all-other-things-being-equal" situation,  
in my view. Or maybe not the opposite, but that exactly. What you're  
describing are tender birds, but in period, still probably what we'd  
regard as free-range and not pumped full of hormones to make a two- 
month-old bird have as much meat as an adult. Doing it the old- 
fashioned way, it takes more feed and several months of exercise to  
produce a bird as big as a capon, but there's still probably more  
connective tissue in the meat as a result. The good news is that a  
capon has marbled fat, somewhat like a good steak, and doesn't easily  
dry out when cooked for a longish time.

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