Cape Town - Henry started these columns with me seven years ago and Henry will be with me almost to the bitter end.
Henry was my childhood chicken. I was very fond of him until one day he appeared on the table for Sunday lunch. He looked surprisingly scrawny for a well-loved chicken, I thought. But we ate him anyway.
I am not normally as callous about my pets. I have never eaten any of my cats or the few dogs that I have owned now and then over the years. Somehow, our dogs have never really stuck. We would just get fond of one and move house or to another town or country. In one instance, the dog we owned just got tired of us and moved out.
After he’d been missing for three weeks we found him living with the people across the road. I had thought that I’d heard his bark in the night but was never able to locate him.
The dog I remember best was Rocky, who was my childhood dog, as was his mother Olga. Olga was the family hound, a little brown dachshund, or sausage dog as my father called him, not wanting to say a German name.
That generation of Englishman could never quite forgive them, what with the war and Hitler and all that. Come to think of it, it was surprising they’d got German dogs at all.
Rocky was my dog, though, and I loved him until we left Oranjemund in 1969 and moved to Cape Town and had to rehome him. He went to live with the McBrides, our best friends in the diamond mining town, and they were strangely quiet when, over the next few months, we would enquire as to Rocky’s well-being.
Eventually, later that year, they came to Cape Town on holiday and came to visit us and to tell us somewhat sheepishly that there had been road excavations outside their house and Rocky had met his maker at the front end of a bulldozer. I couldn’t help thinking – I still think it now – that they might have spared us the gory details. Like said it was a car, or a scooter, that got him. Or that he’d got tired of them and gone to live with the people across the street.
Our pet cats in Oranjemund had been Charley and Dainty Dinah, so named for her ridiculously dainty walk. She was a great puddle of black fur with pretty white points and would mince about like a drag queen with the spotlight on her.
But it never occurred to me to eat any of the other pets for Sunday lunch, as the Chinese might do. I was nearly born Chinese, actually, so things could have been very different for our pets.
In Yorkshire, soon after the end of hostilities and after my dad had proposed and my mom, without thinking, had accepted, my dad said to her, “By the way, love, I can’t stay in a cold climate like this so we ’ave to go and live abroad.”
He’d been all over during the war in his postings in the Royal Navy, from Honolulu and Bangkok to Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the north of England would never be the same for him again.
It came down to either Hong Kong or Oranjemund, as it turned out, which seems mad now. But my mother put her foot down. “I’m not ’avin’ my kids brought up Chinese,” she said, so that was that.
Not having been brought up Chinese, I eat neither cat nor dog, although I still somehow wish they’d chosen Hong Kong. How fascinating that would have been rather than Oranjemund, a dusty desert dump I desperately yearned to leave.
We weren’t really the sort of people who kept strange pets such as snakes or dragons, although we did have a cage full of 15 budgerigars and canaries in the garden, until one day, under strict instructions to feed them at 3pm and be sure to close the door, I fed them and forgot to close the door. I remembered five minutes later and ran out to shut it, but it was too late. Those birds had flown.
But chicken we did eat, and my mom’s roast chicken was the best. For years now, my daughter has said her dad’s roast chicken is the best, and even today, when we visit her or she us, I am under strict orders to roast a chicken at least once during the stay.
I’m not saying there’s anything special about it, but she would emphatically say there is. Either way – and bearing in mind that I do not cook it exactly the same way every time – this is how I made it this week.
Just try not to become too fond of your chicken before your dad chops its head off and decides to turn it into lunch.
Roast Chicken with Sage and Lemon
Ingredients
1 plump chicken
Butter or canola oil or olive oil
Sage leaves, their stems removed
1 large very ripe lemon, cut in half
Salt and pepper to taste
Method
* Wash and dry bird inside cavity and out. Season cavity with salt and pepper and any spices if you’re using them. For this recipe, place a few sage sprigs inside cavity. Slice lemon in half and squeeze juice inside (not outside and definitely not on skin). Place halved lemon wedges in cavity.
* Lift breast skin with your fingers (from cavity end) and carefully prise breast skin loose. Push some sage leaves between flesh and skin. Either spread butter on outer skin and then season with salt and pepper, or season first with salt and then pepper and drizzle with oil. (Alternatively, add a few garlic cloves to cavity with lemon, and/or use a halved onion instead of lemon. I sometimes use halved ripe tomatoes, which is great for flavour, but this is not good for getting crisp skin.)
* Roast in a preheated 230°C or 240°C oven for about 70 minutes before testing and if juices are still running pink, roast for another 10 to 15 minutes. Cooking time may need to be adjusted as some birds are bigger than others.
How to get that skin nice and crisp? There are many schools of thought but here are two ways and some pointers to get a beautifully roasted fowl:
* Mix together 1 tsp salt and 2 tsp baking powder and rub this into skin. Refrigerate for several hours before oiling or buttering and roasting.
* Or oil or butter skin (using cold butter, rub it into skin with your fingers), then salt it and roast in a very hot oven. The key, for me, is the temperature. Unlike lamb, for which you first roast on a high heat and then turn down to a more moderate heat, a chicken needs to continue roasting at a very high temperature, then be allowed a good 20 minutes with oven switched off and door ajar, to tenderise and relax.
* Test by inserting a clean metal skewer into thickest part of meat – breast is best – all the way to the bone. At the point on the skin where skewer enters, press down with your fingers or round side of a spoon, to force some of the juices to run out. Juices should be clean, as should the skewer when you remove it.
Weekend Argus