CHICKEN

First meal of 2008: boiled cock! 

Outrageous? Boring? No, no, no, it's delicious. Definitely a forgotten pleasure.

Of course, when the only place where one can buy chicken is a supermarket where supply only includes mass produced and badly fed birds, there is no point trying the recipe out. But if you can buy a cock from a farm or find a good quality specimen in a store somewhere, then boiling over a low fire with vegetables can yield a divine meal.

An adult male chicken requires a bit of work, a series of operations that my mum used to carry out when I was a child and which served as a first, domestic introduction into basic animal anatomy. Yesterday, after many years, she went through the motions again, showing me how to clean the stomach, remove the bile, the eyes, the tongue and so on. The deconstruction of the bird turned into a baroque ceremony as the tv played the famous arias from the Opera of La Fenice in Venice.

The chicken made a last plunge into a tall pot of boiling water. After 45 minutes, carrots, celery, red onion, garlic, fennel, catalogna spigata, bay leaves and potatoes followed. 

Little compares with young chicken stock, well actually hen's stock is even better (they say it's the food reserved for a woman who has just given birth, my mum's tale from a century and a half ago). 

I also like the Chinese version, where the chicken is served cold with a wine and garlic broth.

But in China you can still buy your chicken alive and people (some old people) know what a tasty chicken looks like. But that's another story...