Some of my cousins lived in North Cornwall not far from Roscarrack, the farm used for the original television film of Nampara. They were Methodists and it was the custom every so often to invite the local preacher to Sunday dinner. On one occasion when I was staying on the farm, my aunt decided to have boiled fowl. Two or three large birds were killed and plucked the day before and cooked over an open fire in an enormous iron saucepan. There was also a large piece of belly pork and mountains of potatoes and greens. We sat down to dinner – fourteen or fifteen of us – at a long kitchen table. I was just about to start mine when I heard one of my cousins say, ‘Preacher Fowle will say grace first. I was about five years old at the time, very plump, with an uncontrollable giggle. I started to laugh and could not stop. The others saw nothing funny in the connection. I was not popular for quite a while.
SERVES 8
1 large fowl, weighing about 3 kg (7 lbs)
hard-boiled eggs
1 tablespoon parsley
275 g (10 oz) short crust pastry (see here)
salt and pepper
Boil the fowl in slightly salted water until it is tender. Cut into joints and skin them. Put into an ovenproof pie dish and cover with the sliced hard-boiled eggs. Sprinkle with chopped parsley. Season and half fill with stock in which the fowl was boiled. Cover with a pastry lid and bake at 200°C (400°F) Gas 6 until the pastry is brown.
Round the dining table of the parlour of Nampara House one windy afternoon in 1787 six gentlemen were seated.
They had dined and wined well, off part of a large cod, a chine of mutton, a chicken pie, some pigeons and a fillet of veal with roasted sweetbreads, apricot tart, a dish of cream and almonds and raisins.
Ross Poldark, Book Two, Chapter I
At my cousins’ farm, the chicken or fowl would be killed and brought in complete with feathers. It was then plucked and singed. The feathers except the wing feathers were put in a bag and put in a warm oven to kill all the mites.These feathers were kept until there were sufficient to make a pillow. The nails were cut off and the feet put in a basin of boiling water and then skinned. These were then added to the gizzard (already emptied and skinned), the liver and heart. All these were boiled together to make stock for gravy.