[Sca-cooks] Chickens in Hochee-
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Wed Jun 1 17:36:50 PDT 2005
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
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