Joe McNamee: Growing up, chicken was a treat for the wealthy

Chicken used to be a rare treat. Not anymore.

I remember once as a child having a chicken sandwich in the middle of the week. It was no elaborate assemblage, salted breast of chicken, sandwiched between slices of buttered batch loaf but to me it was an extraordinary extravagance, served up by a wealthy friend of my mother’s as if she were Marie Antoinette slumming it with the commoners. I have a notion she even apologised for her parsimony.

Back then, chicken was a rare treat in our house. Actually, it was a rare treat in most houses, even in our middle class part of Cork, generally served as Sunday roast. Though my talented mother could turn her hand to all manner of things, her hands were severed at the wrists when it came to cooking. Yet, despite her gallant efforts, she could never entirely ruin the Sunday roast and a leg was always my failsafe request, even if the bird had the sweaty pallor of an obese albino. With six equally ravenous siblings, by Sunday evening the only part left of the bird to put between two slices of bread was the memory and we’d even squabble over that.

If ever a foodstuff most clearly illustrates the humongous socio-economic changes in Ireland and the world over the last 40 or 50 years, it is chicken. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the human race slaughters and consumes a staggering 73.79 billion each year. And then there is the matter of how we consume them.

The Irish Times recently reported on two Dublin schoolboys who won a year’s supply of chicken burgers from a just-opened branch of US franchise, Popeye’s, joining a flurry of other new fast food chicken franchises from the States: Dave’s Hot Chicken, Wingstop, and Chick-fil-A. They join Kentucky Fried Chicken, in Ireland since 1970 when Pat Grace opened the first franchise in Dublin and McDonalds introduced chicken nuggets on their Irish menus in 1983. Old, new, all serving deep-fried chicken, turning one of nature’s finest and most nutritious meat proteins into a fast food snack. As I wrote recently in these parts, I’d nearly fear deep-fried chicken more than AI as humanity’s greatest threat.

Breaded, deep fried chicken is freighted with higher calories, unhealthy fats, and inflammatory compounds from oil, breading and other additives, including high levels of sodium, as is typical of ultra-processed foods. Oven-cooked nuggets may be less fatty and calorific but many are made from ground meat, trimmings, skin and connective tissue, bound with starch, refined breaded coating spiking blood sugar levels. Many ‘healthier oven-ready nuggets are flash-fried in oil, then chilled or frozen in the factory, to replicate ‘fried chicken’ when oven-cooked, negating most ‘health savings’.

In 1980s Ireland, the Maximum Prices (Chickens) Order set the price at 172p per kg, with giblets. (At 176p per kg without giblets, it heralded a future when we would pay more for convenience and get less bird.) A 1.5kg chicken costing IR£2.56 in 1980 would today cost €15.19. Last weekend, I saw chickens in one of the major Irish multiples for just €4; two sole breasts in a tray alongside were €4.50. You don’t need me to detail the iniquities of the global industrial chicken processing system to comprehend the compromises in terms of animal cruelty and environmental impact that enable such an astonishing reduction in price over decades even as most other food costs have soared.

Nor is all the chicken we consume Irish — we can’t meet the demand. Though Irish-based fast food franchises generally trumpet their use of any Irish produce, Popeye’s freely acknowledge that they don’t use Irish chicken, nor do they have any immediate plans to do so.

Good fried chicken is dangerously delicious, so I apply my pizza rule — only eat the stuff you cook from scratch, making it a rare treat. Even then, it will never compare to a proper free range chicken from a named small producer, poached in the stockpot or roasted in the oven. It will definitely cost more than €4, between €15 and €20 on average for a 2.5kg bird but it will be of a higher standard and will feed us for days. And when you savour the healing essence of chicken broth or relish the gamey flavours of roast thigh with rich gravy and roast potatoes, you never really think of fried chicken at all.

Table Talk

Several years have passed since I predicted Glass Curtain chef-proprietor Brian Murray’s next restaurant venture, Birdsong, was set to be the restaurant opening of the ‘year’ but ongoing issues with the original proposed venue eventually saw Murray instead opt for the former Chambers bar on Washington St, opposite the Courthouse.

And, opening in November, my prediction may be late but I still think it will be Cork’s restaurant opening of the year — in 2026. Murray is looking for staff so all interested applicants should forward a short cover letter and CV to [e-mail].

Projection Gourmande (Oct 9) sees The Metropole Hotel partner with Alliance Française de Cork for an immersive dining/film experience. After a four-courser of regional French dishes from Trigon Hotels executive chef Alex Petit, by now a fully adopted Corkonian, there will be a screening of Sébastien Tulard’s heartwarming French film, Sugar & Stars, about a young chef pursuing his culinary dreams.

• eventbrite.ie

Today's Special

One Pan Wins by Neven Maguire 

Though my passion for one-pot cooking was born out of necessity, a single gas ring and a cast iron pot in a London squat in the 1980s, it remains one of my favourite ways to cook, so I loved Neven Maguire’s latest cookbook, One Pan Wins (Gill), almost before I opened it. The recipes are extensive, covering vegetarian, fish and shellfish, poultry, beef, lamb, and pork and bacon. There are even desserts. As ever, recipes range far and wide, offering novelty for jaded young palates and a flavour bomb section is a smart way of countering the sometimes lack of contrast in a one-pot dish. My current pick of the recipes is duck confit with braised Puy lentils.

• nevenmaguire.com/product/one-pan-wins/