Eating chickens

What the young set have had to say about food has put me in a pensive mood. DD (Dearest Daughter) has great difficulty finding suitable fish. Well, as an old toppie I don't think you can get a decent chicken either. The newer generations are used to the foul fowls offered by todays supermarket so are not aware of what we are being cheated out of.



When I was a brat chicken was a rare and very expensive dish. So expensive that we raised our own. When chicken was to be on the menu there was no collecting one off the shelf. You selected your fowl, caught it, chopped it's head off, plucked it, feathers and guts, and burnt off the remaining tiniest feathers over a Primus stove. The gizzard was cut open and cleaned and retained with the liver and heart to enrich the gravy. If the unfortunate fowl was broody it had in it a fascinating set of eggs ranging from the size of a golf ball down to a pea or less.



Almost always the chicken was roasted in the coal stove's oven with roast potatoes that split down the centre, crisp outside and soft inside with sweet salty juices that spread to every part of your mouth. The chicken would be tough by today's measure but tasty beyond belief. Sometimes, rarely, there would be chicken pie with thick crust and juices drawn up into the cup placed upside down in the middle of the dish. Then the chicken was as tender as my mother's parting words as my departed father would say.



I learnt that nothing is more stupid that a chicken. It will run when you try to catch it, but once caught, it lays dead (pun) still as you stretch its neck on the block. It just lies there and looks at you. After the axe had parted head from body the chicken would thrash around for a while splashing bright crimson blood on the sharply contrasting brown sand. Fascinating. Well OK, a bit gruesome but remember we had no telly in those days. OG (oldest grandson) tells me fowls do not have a wide gene pool. I can believe that!



By the time I went to school I knew that the meat we ate with such pleasure was not manufactured by the butcher but came from a once living animal. There was no such thing a sex education then (nobody dared use the s-x word) but I had a fair grounding in conception, birth, life and death. Exposure to fowl guts gave me some idea of animal biology. Feeding the birds and collecting eggs developed responsibility. In all, not a bad education for a pre-schooler. I doubt that todays city child has as good a preparation for life.