If, as I was told the other day, much of the frozen chicken and duck meat brought into this country comes from the Far East, it may be that some of us have already been exposed to the risk of contracting avian flu. But I don’t suppose that this will weigh with the government when there is another major scare — a couple of chickens found to have the dreaded virus in a heavily populated part of southern England. With its instinct for over-reaction, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will order that all poultry be kept indoors. When shall we then be able to enjoy a free-range chicken or a free-range egg again?
Not wishing to be a Jeremiah, I would rather describe the joys of eating this remarkable domestic bird. The French like to know what sort of poultry they are getting (such as the famous poulet de Bresse, from Burgundy), but the most important thing is that the bird should be free-range, whether for the quality of its flesh or its eggs. And by free-range I do not mean hundreds of birds kept in a shed with a small ‘pop-hole’, which in effect allows only a tiny proportion of them to venture outside. The birds should be able to range freely on grass all day long and grow naturally; if they are also fed corn, so much the better. The fact that they may be classified as organic, according to the standards of the Soil Association, adds nothing, in my humble opinion, to their flavour, though quite a lot to their price.
When we had a house years ago in southern Spain, a local smallholder would occasionally bring to our door what he called a pollo de campo, which had probably never been indoors in its life.
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