Another that crops up occasionally is chicken with green tea. A recently-published example of this seemed inordinately complex with, as I find in many of the recipes that I peruse, far too many ingredients. I would like to present my own, long-established and approved by a small but discerning band, simple recipe for green tea chicken.
First catch your chicken. Now there’s a can of worms if you like, though few enough hens will ever see one. There have not long since been television programmes touching on chicken husbandry, notably Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s, which is a good thing as there are not so many good things in the rearing of most of the poultry consumed in the supposedly civilised world. Rather than continue, I should like to refer you once again to Hattie Ellis’s book, Planet Chicken (with Fearnley-Whittingstall writing the excellent foreword), for which she performed an impressive amount of research worldwide.
What I remember most clearly are the descriptions of some of the physical descriptions of the conditions to which many chickens are subjected and the appalling treatment at the hands of people clearly devoid of compassion. Hattie tells me that she pulled her punches, believing that her accounts were sufficiently shocking. They are. Do read them and more.
So, please, avoid the £2 chickens from supermarkets. Avoid scraggy, worn out battery hens not even fit for making stock as they are likely full of exotic chemistry. Even free-range has a meaning in law far from the rosy, rustic semi-paradise that the term implies. I buy only ark (living in small, moveable houses) chicken or organic which guarantee fresh air and pecking the earth.
Alex Fraser runs east teas, now relocated in the new Jubilee Market of Borough Market, London, on Fridays 12-6 and Saturdays 9-4. contact via epoch@eastteas.com.
