Spring Chicken

Comfort food.

Not a Yorkshireman's reason for calling in at a restaurant but something that makes up a good proportion of the experience of eating.

The recent proliferation of TV programmes and magazine features on baking, home cooking and practical culinary, such as 15 minute meals is, I feel, an indication of a longing desire to return to basics, the food we associate with our childhoods and home life.

This is very real to me as my wife has just, beautiful and technical language excluded, boiled up the remains of the chicken from yesterdays tea.

This was something my mother always did and a decent sized chicken could meet the dietary requirements of a large and always hungry seven person family as part of a huge sunday roast, provide a cold filling for sandwiches on a monday and be distilled and crafted in a big pot on the stove all day tuesday to provide a nourishing and reassuring broth.

Todays soup was absolutely delicious and served at about 3pm after a busy day for us all I do not expect to feel hungry again until possibly midnight. (Check we have some cheese for about that time)

It was a complete meal in itself.

None of this nouvelle cuisine of the 1980's which under the same description will no doubt have consisted of a micro dot of stock infused with the essence of carrot, scent of onion and a near trace of goodness that only a spectograph in a Pathology Laboratory could detect with any certainty. I do recall a frantic search for a takeaway pizza late one night after my wife and I had attended a dinner of that food genre but had expended more calories in chasing a solitary pea, carved beetroot rose and sliver of sirloin around a platter made out of a slate- you can imagine the impracticalities of gravy on a surface with no raised edge.

The soup of today was fragrant and enticing. Perfectly cooked chunks of carrot, thinly cut mushrooms, transparent and abundant onion, a stick of celery, well seasoned and with a faint and enigmatic hint of a green thai curry around delicate pieces of fleshy chicken. I could feel the warming liquid permeating my very soul and especially the extremities of my body on a cold November day when the sun had barely been able to break free from its shroud of grey, all pervading cloud.

If there could ever be a perfect antidote for the onset of depression when it gets dark at 4pm and especially on a sunday with a return to work looming my wife has found it.

I have worked out that the purchase of a dozen or so huge canteen sized tureens ,a  production line of a hundred or so chicken carcasses a day and a tipper lorry load of fresh vegetables will see me, the family and half the town through until the breaking light of next spring. Now that is a comforting thought.