On the Wing

Antonietta dropped by this afternoon for a brief chat. Obeying the courtesy demanded by our elders, "Never return an empty dish" (or "Never return a dish empty"), she brought back a little bowl of mine with three fresh eggs inside. I'd given her some pesto I'd made (with walnuts, not pine nuts) and more than three eggs would not have fit. When "Bird Flu" threatened to spread through Western Europe a couple of years ago, she and her husband, Amedeo, slaughtered (and ate) their roosters and retained only the laying hens. Bless their hearts, the hens don't seem to miss the lack of stimulation and keep right on producing, although less frequently.
One fact I learned when the disease was rampant in Asia and showed up briefly in Eastern Europe was that only male chickens are raised for sale in supermarkets and individual meat markets. Apparently the sex of a baby chick can be determined in fewer than five days after hatching and poultry farms sell off most the females as fast as they can. Once in a while we all buy a full-grown female, called a gallina, to make a broth or soup, but the meat is pretty stringy by itself. Boiling the bird for a number of hours is the only way to render it useful.
Italians prize roosters for Sunday dinner and if they don't have access to the free-range variety they ask the butcher for a giant male chicken with a lot of bruises. Males fight each other like mad (guess why) and the theory is that bruises tenderize the meat.
I have never cooked a rooster, but I sure like baked chicken prepared with shoots of fresh rosemary, a couple slivers of garlic and kosher salt stuffed between the skin and the meat. Naturally, we baste the bird with olive oil to make it nice and crispy. What a feast.