Bones_ Recipes, History, and Lore - Jennifer McLagan [60]
Make friends with your butcher and you will discover that chicken bones, backs, and trimmings are readily available for stock. A couple of extra backs or necks tossed into the roasting pan with the whole bird will not only serve as a makeshift roasting rack, they’ll greatly improve the taste of the finished sauce. Take advantage of the obsession with boneless breasts to snap up the less popular, more flavorful bone-in legs and thighs. Feet and necks, often tossed away, can be cooked and eaten or added to the stockpot. Even the leftover carcass from a roasted bird can add flavor as a base for soup.
For the cook to bone means to remove bones from meat or fish, but for a carpenter it means to look along the sight line of several objects to make sure they are in line or level. It comes from French word bomoyer, which means to look with one eye. It is also a British slang expression meaning to steal.
The choice of poultry has increased with the growing availability of game birds. Today’s farm-raised birds may not be as intensely livery as those shot in the wild, but they are of consistent quality, more tender, and free of buckshot—for cooks, they greatly simplify game bird cookery. Leaner than domesticated poultry, they rely on their bones to keep their meat juicy.
All birds, big or small, from the common chicken and its exotic cousin the guinea hen to the tiny quail and the large turkey, all have the same basic skeleton. Looking at the bird’s skeleton and seeing where all those bones and the meat are attached will help you when cooking, carving, and eating any poultry from the smallest game bird to the largest turkey.
Boneless: means having no bones, or lacking character
The Whole Bird
There is a tremendous choice of poultry ranging in size and taste from single serving to crowd satisfying, from mild flavored to rich and gamey.
Most whole birds are sold oven-ready. Simply put your hand inside and pull out the neck and the plastic bag of giblets (see “The Extremities and Odds and Ends”) and the bird is ready to cook. Game birds, though, often need some preparation before cooking. If they are sold with the head and feet attached, ask your butcher to cut them off and take the trimmings with you.
The leanest and most tender poultry meat comes from the middle section of the bird, its breast. The breast is supported by the breastbone and the ribs. At the neck end of the breast is the furcula, or wishbone. It sits with its two forks attached to the collarbone and the tip joined by cartilage to the breastbone.
The wings consist of three sections. The first, closest to the body, has a single bone, the next section has two parallel bones, and the tip has several tiny bones. While chicken and turkey wings are quite meaty, the wings of ducks, geese, and birds that regularly fly have little meat and are very chewy. Some people cut them off before the bird is roasted, but I often leave them to help truss the bird (see page 144).
Bone is used as an adjective meaning extremely or absolutely
Bone idle or bone lazy: utterly idle or lazy
Bone weary or bone tired: exhausted
Bone dry: very dry, as dry as bones
Bone clean, or as clean as a bare bone
Bone hungry means extremely hungry
Bone chilling means either very frightening or very cold, so chilled to the bone Bone up or study intensively.
The legs and thighs do the most work so they have firmer, darker, and more flavorful meat. There is one bone in the thigh and another in the leg. The legs or drumsticks of larger birds and some game birds also have what seem to be very thin bones attached to the leg bone, but they are actually tendons.
Bonebed is a geological term to describe