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[Scipio]

On this Fanfic forum we've had a fictional software manual, an ASCII graphic novel, a popular science essay and sundry other off-forum themes. It's time for another one.

I unintentionally but gravely upset an old family friend one Sunday morning. "What's your favourite chicken dish?" she asked.

"Mutton curry."

"Eh?"

"Chicken," I explained, "is what you eat when you don't have real meat."

Twenty minutes later she surprised us with Sunday brunch ? chicken a la king. I was mortified. My wife did subsequently kill me but I believe I should do further penance.


How to roast a chicken

I suspect I might be taken to task if I publish my standard chicken recipe because it may be considered too terse. If I were to publish it, this is how it would go:

INGREDIENTS
1 chicken
1 packet of pork sausages
1 bowl of mashed potatoes
1 bowl of green peas
1 jug of brown onion gravy

METHOD
Fry the sausages and eat them with the mashed potatoes, peas and gravy.
Give the chicken to the dog.

I want to train myself to walk very quickly so that when I go by, people will say: "Look, it's Fast Scipio!" It would be hurtful if they were to look up from their recipe books and say: "Look, there goes Terse Scipio!" To prevent this I will give the world my comprehensive and unabridged recipe for roast chicken.

The first thing you'll need is a chicken. In small towns like Eshowe in Zululand you can probably catch one running around the car park at the supermarket. If you have the budget for it, you could buy a bunch of live chickens from one of the Zulus who holds them upside down by their feet, like a gigantic feather-duster, and sells them at the minibus taxi rank behind the herbalist's shop. If you do patronise the Zulu chicken-man, choose a chicken that's ripe, but not one that's gone pulpy.

When you've taken your chicken home, give it some water and a handful of corn. This will hydrate it and fatten it a little. You don't want a dry, skinny roast chicken.

Now take it into the garden to kill it. There are many ways you may do this, all of them offering some benefits and some disadvantages.

If you want to be considered an imaginative chef you'll need to find a more creative method than simply chopping off the chicken's head with the axe you normally use backwards as a big hammer. Come to think of it, you're probably so clumsy with an axe that you'd do better to bash the chicken's brains out with the blunt part. Whether you use the cutting edge or the hammer end, be careful not to hit your thumb.

Many modern suburbanites and city-dwellers don't have axes. As alternatives, vehicles make very good instruments for the execution of chickens. Get a friend to hold the chicken down while you reverse your SUV over its head. Or tell the friend to push the chicken's head up the exhaust pipe while you rev the engine for a few minutes. Don't worry about the build-up of carbon monoxide in the chicken's blood. It will all come out when you drain the chicken's veins (unless you like really juicy, pink chicken).

In robust parts of the world, many householders have guns or other weapons. If your gun-safe holds a .30-06 hunting rifle with telescopic sight, you can turn the roast chicken thing into an entertaining afternoon of hunting before you get down to the cooking. Just remember to go for a good killing shot, and don't let the dying chicken run into a corner of the garden. You know what they say about the dangers of encountering a cornered animal when it's wounded.

A 12-gauge shotgun is probably not a good idea unless you want to scrap the roast chicken and do a nice chicken stew. The use of automatic weapons also tends to make for a rather ugly roast chicken.

One exhilarating way of dispatching the chicken would be to tie it to a bamboo pole, then take out your replica samurai sword and see if you can remove the chicken's head and the top of the pole with a single stroke of the blade. And if you have a friend in the security forces who can sneak you a few items, a hand grenade would not only kill the chicken, it might remove most of the feathers, too.

Ah, the feathers. This is sometimes a bother with roast chicken. You have to pluck the bird before you cook it. Normally you should do this only after you've killed the chicken or it may not enjoy the experience.

Once the bird is completely naked you can proceed to remove the head and the feet. If you used a car, a hammer or a piano-wire garrote, the chicken's head should be pretty loose already. You can finish the job with a good pair of kitchen scissors. For the feet, a pair of tin-snips or a big pair of pliers should do. In addition to the feet you must remove the lower part of the legs as well, the skinny parts that look like they used to belong to Angelina Jolie. You won't want to cut off the plump, succulent thighs that wouldn't look out of place on Jennifer Lopez.

Ready for the next step? Scratch through all the kitchen cabinets until you find that corkscrew you stopped using when you decided to save money by buying wine in cardboard boxes. Twist the corkscrew all the way into the chicken's bottom, then yank it out sharply. All the innards should come out in a gooey, quivering blob. I strongly urge you not to lick them to see if they taste like strawberry ice cream.

Your chicken should now be featherless, headless, footless, hollow and, ideally, dead. If it is still emitting feeble squawks, you have done something wrong ? get another chicken and start again. This is the poultry equivalent of rebooting. Or you could use normal booting ? kick the chicken until it stops making any noise.

There is still much to be done before your bird will be ready for the roasting pan. It is now dead but it is dirty. Also, there seems to be some strange notion that a hollow roast chicken is an incomplete roast chicken.

Take the chicken to the kitchen sink. Run cold water strongly into the front end and out the back end until the liquid going down the drain is no longer too pink and lumpy. When washing a chicken for the oven, it is best not to use bleach or detergent. Save those chemicals to wash the smell of dead chicken off your hands and the garden spade.

Poor chicken... after being executed and maimed it looks pretty stuffed, but it's going to suffer still more stuffing.

My mother stuffed her roast chickens. She learnt that from her mother, who was a really strange woman... she did after all give birth to my mother.

From Granny and Mom I discovered that the gunk that comes out of the bits that come out of a chicken looks exactly like the gunk that cooks force back into the bird before roasting it.

Mix a selection of arcane ingredients to produce a paste with the appearance and texture of oats porridge mixed with peanut butter. Hmm, maybe it WAS oats and peanut butter. Push this goo into the chicken's bottom. Force in a few handfuls. The trick is to keep the other hand free to stop the stuffing oozing out of the end where the jugular vein used to be. If your chicken died of shotgun wounds you may need to use masking-tape to plug some of the holes temporarily.

As with the plucking, it is VERY important to make sure the chicken is dead before you start stuffing it. Especially if you intend to stuff it with a whole lemon.

You're almost ready to pop the chicken into the oven. You smear it with cooking oil, I reckon, so that the skin will go brown. You also have to plug the big hole where all the stuffing is slipping out. Try a large potato.

So what's left to do? Oh, yes... take the packet of pork sausages out of the fridge and pop some green peas into the microwave, I think.

[WeeRLegion]

A real man's cooking tips! Bravo!