Mike’s Little Chickens

The story begins many years ago when my mother called her youngest daughter to ask a favor. Pam and her husband, Mike, lived a few miles north of Chicago where Mike was a chemist for a major corporation.

“Pammy, could you come up to Hayward for a few days to help me clean out Dad’s things?” asked my mother. My father had died the previous fall and my mother had moved into an apartment in Hayward for the winter. When spring arrived, she was ready to move back into the house in the country with its birds, bears and flowers.

It was May, and school was still in session, so Mike could oversee Carolyn and Ben as a single parent for a few days with after-school help from the neighbors. Carolyn was ten and Ben, eight years old.

When Saturday arrived, Mike asked Ben and Carolyn what they wanted for supper. He assumed that they would want to go out for hamburgers or pizzas after two days of Dad’s cooking. He was about to be surprised.

“I want one of those little chickens,” said Ben. Carolyn said that she wanted one too. The problem was that Mike did not know what they were talking about.

“You want to go to the KFC. Good” said Mike.

“No! We want little chickens to eat here,” said Ben.

“They were good,” added Carolyn.

After a game of twenty questions, Mike finally understood that they were talking about Cornish game hens which Pam had cooked a few times. So father, daughter and son drove to the supermarket and bought three Cornish game hens and the ingredients Mike dredged from his memory of how he roasted them when it was his turn to cook for his housemates when he was in graduate school.

As you might expect from a young man who had to cook and do the dishes, he had created a simple recipe that could be made in one pan. He roasted four birds, one for each guy, and the dish became a regular on the house menu when it was Mike’s turn to cook.

Incidentally, the kids loved “Dad’s little chickens” and Pam still thinks the story is hilarious.

I have cut Mike’s recipe in half, but it still serves four. Of course, you can easily increase the number of birds and adjust the amount of rice and broth you need to accommodate more diners. You will need more baking pans, because you should not crowd the hens.

INGREDIENTS:

2 Cornish game hens
1 1/2 cups white rice
3 T butter, divided
2 cups chicken broth
Salt and pepper

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 375º. Grease or spray an eight by twelve inch glass baking pan. Rinse the rice and put it in the pan. Stir in the broth and a dash or two of black pepper. Dot with a tablespoon of butter.

Rub the game hens with salt and pepper inside and out and put a half tablespoon of butter into each body cavity. Set the birds on the rice, breast side up, and put them on the the center shelf for thirty minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and cover it with aluminum foil. Return it to the oven and bake for another thirty-five minutes.

Melt a tablespoon of butter. Remove the foil and baste the hens with the butter. Put the pan back in the oven and continue baking for another half hour or until the hens are done. An instant-read thermometer should register 165º in the thickest part of the thigh.

Serve with bread and salad.

NOTES: Ben and Carolyn were right. Cornish game hens are little chickens. They were first produced in the 1950‘s by Alphonsine “Te” and Jacques Makowsky at their poultry farm in Connecticut. Alphonsine came up with the idea of crossing small Cornish game cocks with larger chickens. The most successful cross was with a Malayan fighting cock and a white Plymouth rock hen.

The first “Rock Cornish Hens” were meant to be a substitute for the Guinea hens the Makowsky farm had been supplying restaurants after all the birds had been killed in a fire, but the Cornish game hens were an instant success in their own right and are prized today for their succulent white meat.

Jerri especially likes the crispy rice on the edges of the pan.

Baked Custard

My parents, like many others, survived the Great Depression by buying only what they really needed, wasting as little as possible and stretching the little money they had as far as they possibly could.  Men saved nails and screws from old lumber and built new things from the scavenged materials.  Women learned to sew and mend clothing, to recycle the yarn from old sweaters, socks and caps and to cook creatively with whatever ingredients were available.

Unlike the people who lived in larger cities during the Depression, Mom and Dad always had enough to eat.  They grew up on farms in northern Wisconsin, so they knew how to grow vegetables, milk cows, raise hogs and tend poultry.  Dad learned to hunt grouse and deer and both were experienced anglers.

Dad loved to tell the story of how he once earned a dollar fishing on the Namekagon River when he was a boy.  The river flowed through Grandpa’s farm, and Dad had been taught to fish as soon as he was old enough to hold a “brush pole,” a stick with a string and hook on the end.  In the 1920’s, the Namekagon was already a well-known brown trout stream, and trout fishermen from “the cities” were regular visitors to the Hayward area.

One day my grandmother sent Dad to the river with orders to bring home trout for supper.  He dug some angleworms behind the chicken coop, grabbed his steel extension rod and headed for the river.  The trout were biting so well that he started keeping only the larger ones, and it wasn’t very long before he had a dozen or more nice browns strung on a stick.

As he walked along the river toward the logging road that led back to the house, he met a trout fisherman.  Dad was impressed.  The man had a bamboo fly rod, a fishing jacket with lots of pockets and a wicker creel.  The only thing missing was trout.  When he saw  those trout on the stick, his eyes got a glint in them, and he offered Dad a dollar for the six biggest ones.

He could have gotten them for a quarter.  When Dad agreed to sell the fish, the man made him promise not to say anything about their bargain to any other fishermen he might meet, as he had a “little bet” with his partners.  Dad had to catch some more trout to take home, but he had a dollar for his trouble and was more than satisfied.

There were no trout streams near the farm where Mom grew up, but there were lakes within walking distance where she learned to catch bluegills and bullheads.  She learned to garden and tend the chickens, ducks and geese that Grandma Hopp raised.  She didn’t like to milk cows, but she did it when she had to, and she was an experienced poultry processor by the time she was a teenager.

After I was born, my father became an auto mechanic and my mother, like most women at the time, stayed home to keep the house and raise her family.  When we lived in town, our house was on a large lot with a big garden plot.  One of my earliest memories of it was watching the man plow it with a huge Fordson tractor.  It had steel wheels with big cleats, and Dad and the man had to put down planks to protect the pavement when he drove across the highway to our lot.

When I was seven years old, we moved about four miles out of town, but I have never lived on a farm, except for my two-week summer vacations with Grandpa and Grandma Hopp.  However, we had big gardens and a chicken coop which provided us with meat and eggs.   For the first few years, the dairy in Hayward delivered to customers who lived out of town, so we continued to get our milk, butter and cheese just as we had in town.

When the milkman left the bottles on the doorstep in winter, sometimes Mom would give us a spoonful of frozen cream pushed out of the bottles when the milk froze.  This experience may explain why I prefer ice cream made only with milk, cream and sugar.

Growing up with plenty of fresh milk and chickens probably explains also why I like baked custard.  I suspect that Mom made it because it was a simple and cheap dessert.  She would stir up a batch of custard a few minutes before the bread was ready to come out of the oven and pop the dessert in.  By the time Dad was home from work, there was fresh bread and cups of warm custard to end the meal.

When she was baking pies, she would sometimes make a custard pie instead of baking the custard in cups.  If you don’t want to take the time to make a pie crust, baked custard is the way to go.  The custard is the same–delicate and not too sweet.

Here is how to make enough custard to serve four or five people.

INGREDIENTS:

2 large eggs

1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

2 cups whole milk

1/4 tsp. vanilla extract

Dash of nutmeg

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 325º and bring a teakettle of water to a boil.  Have the eggs at room temperature and warm the milk to about 120º in a microwavable bowl or over moderate heat in a small saucepan.

Beat the eggs in  a mixing bowl until they are scrambled but not completely lemon colored.  Stir in the sugar, salt and vanilla.  Pour the milk into the eggs and stir gently until the sugar is dissolved in the milk and everything is thoroughly mixed. 

Use a measuring cup or small dipper to fill the custard cups or ovenproof bowls to within a quarter inch of the top.  The cups should be clean and dry but not greased.  Sprinkle a little ground nutmeg on each custard.  Put the cups in a baking pan and set the pan on a lower shelf in the oven.  Pour boiling water into the pan so it comes about a third of the way up the sides of the cups.

Bake forty-five minutes, then check for doneness.  A knife inserted near the center of a custard should come out clean.   

Remove the cups from the oven and pan and allow them to cool slightly before serving.

NOTES:  If you don’t have whole milk in your refrigerator, you can use reduced fat milk fortified with a couple tablespoons of butter or a quarter cup of half and half.  Good custard needs a little butterfat to produce the classic texture and flavor.

The reason for having the the eggs at room temperature and warming the milk is to reduce the baking time and to make sure that the milk mixes completely with the eggs and sugar.

My custards in small cups usually take fifty minutes or a little more to bake.  If you need to reduce the time, you can heat the milk to a higher temperature, but be careful to stir it in very slowly to avoid cooking the eggs.

Baked custard is good cold and even better when it is warm.  Be sure to store any leftover cups of custard in the refrigerator as soon as they have cooled to room temperature.