Eating Albion

A few final thoughts, facts and tips concerning chickens. In Channel 4’s chicken-related schedule last week, Hugh’s Chicken Run got 3.5m viewers three nights running, Thursday’s Dispatches on food labelling got 3m and Jamie’s Fowl Dinners got 4m. With such good figures, it’s clear that food provenance is something the public is desperate to find out more about - which is good news for Eating Albion and this whole project. To put those figures in some sort of context, around 800,000 tuned in to see Jade’s eviction on Big Brother’s Celebrity Hijack (anything BB is seen as ‘an earner’ for the channel).

I’d like to end this chicken escapade (for now) with a recipe and how I cooked the chicken from my weekend ordeal. To recap, I had one chicken, some carrots, leeks, onions, tarragon, thyme, and potatoes. I stuffed the chicken with half a lemon, some tarragon and thyme, and four crushed garlic cloves, and rested it on a base of the chopped vegetables. I tried Toby’s ex-girlfriend’s sister’s French boyfriend’s tip (phew!) of popping a crust of bread in the bird’s rear. You can’t use any old ‘coggy-ender’* of Mother’s Pride, however - it’s got to be something like the end of a baguette, something with a crust that can take it. I had a small walnut and onion loaf from the Blackbird bakery, so used the domed end of that.

I roast my chickens upside down for the first 30 minutes, then flip them over. It’s then that I up-end them and drain off a little of the garlicky-lemony-fatty-herby goodness from inside the cavity into the gravy tray. With this particular chicken, the bread crust acted like a bath sponge at this point, letting the juices through, but taking them on as well. But because the end stuck out for the rest of the cooking time, it crisped up too. I pulled it out while the bird rested and ate it with the carrots and parsnips the bird was roasted on. Oh my god, it was good! Good interesting bread, augmented by all the juices. I think out of the whole meal, I enjoyed shoving hot, gooey-yet-crunchy, chickeny, nutty bread in my mouth with some caramelised parsnips the most. It was a great appetiser, in the sense that it stimulated my appetite - a lot.

The second off-the-internet tip I tried was dusting my parboiled roasties with polenta. This tip came from the BBC food message boards. They turned out OK, but tasted a little like those frozen McCain home-style roast potatoes. They did crunch up my poor-quality spuds from Berwick Street Market, but I should have just bought better spuds. Having said that, I think they’d be really popular with kids. But if you don’t try, you’ll never know.

Anyway, here’s the finished result - and yes, I did overcook the leeks. Below is the other meat and 1.5 litres of stock that I got from the rest of the bird. Enough for tea on Sunday, sandwiches for Monday, two tubs for the freezer, and stock for risotto and something else. That’s not bad from a £10 bird.

* This is what my mother and grandmother called each end of a loaf of bread. Apparently the official name is the heel, but I like coggy-ender better.