[Sca-cooks] the undead chicken and eggs

[Guenievre de Monmarche]

I did that one for a feast once - even gilded the outside of the birds. One
trick is that most of the period recipes I've seen for that, or at least the
ones I was working from, call for adding pork or other meats to bulk out the
chicken - one has to make up the mass of the bones and other bits you've
removed if you want it to look like a plump bird rather than a skinny one.
Since there are so many people who don't eat pork, I didn't want to do that
- the solution? a hardboiled egg in the middle.

Guenièvre



On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Sam Wallace <guillaumedep at gmail.com> wrote:

> >> How would you pre-carve a chicken yet be able to present it as a (whole)
> chicken sitting on a next of eggs? Do you pre-cut the chicken into separate
> pieces and then piece them together with wires or wooden sticks to create
> the looks of a complete chicken? Or are you talking about just partially
> cutting through the pieces so that they can be easily cut or torn apart?
>
> > One thing you could do, if you were really careful, would be to carefully
> remove the breast halves, carefully slice them with a sharp knife so they
> remain moire or less assembled, and pat them back into place on the bones,
> and (or possibly do this part first) go in with the tip of a pair of poultry
> shears and snip the joints' connective tissue without cutting through the
> meat or any more of the skin than necessary.
>
> Another technique I have seen in a variety of cookbooks is to remove
> the meat from the bird while keeping the skin intact, mince it into a
> meatloaf-like preparation, replace it on the skeleton, recover with
> the skin, and then cook. I am finishing a translation of a manuscript
> in which this particular trick was done with the bird being
> re-assembled inside a glass bottle, leaving only the head sticking
> out.
>
> Guillaume
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