Spring chicken

Photo by Joy Lai

In 1954, chicken was a special-occasion food for most Australians. While backyard chooks were common, they were used mainly for eggs. So chicken really was a meal for a queen.

The Australian Women’s Weekly Picture Cookery Book advised that boiling and steaming fowls was the best approach when a bird wasn’t young and tender. A spring chicken is a young chicken, but the Openbook test kitchen struggled to get the skin on a poussin (spatchcock) browned to an even consistency appropriate for a photograph. So, we instead poached chicken fillets by placing them in boiling water with fresh bay leaves, lemon and whole peppercorns that we then removed from the stove. It took about 15 minutes. Even if it had been a whole bird, the ‘2–3 hours until tender’ that the cookbook advised would have been excessive.

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Fit for a queen

Spring chicken

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