Not flying the coop: the bird flu lock-up

A recipe for the best Roast chicken

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

Washington DC is an odd fishbowl. A small-town capital, it has grown up almost exclusively around the business of government.

While it houses some of the greatest art galleries in the world and, courtesy of English chemist and philanthropist James Smithson, a series of spectacular museums along the Mall plus the National Zoo, a substantial alternative arts culture has emerged only in the last two decades. The Kennedy Center and the National Theater stage re-runs of Broadway successes. You have to get away from the centre of town to see any provocative productions.

While the suburbs house some of the best South East Asian, Latino and Ethiopian eateries of any capital, it’s only relatively recently, on a global culinary time-line, that central Washington has stretched beyond downtown steak-and-Martini expense account grills to provide meals that draw a different, younger demographic to hip restaurants across the city.

The politicians who live in DC, and the foreign correspondents who cover them, tend to be en poste only for the length of an election term - four years. And if the Senators and Congressmen aren’t re-elected, they’re whipped back to Nebraska, North Dakota and any of the other states an extended flight away from the glittering private dinner tables of Georgetown, the historic area where many of them will have lived.

Which is why large numbers of them do their best to secure a permanent position at one of DC’s abundant firms of lobbyists or consultants. Despite the Founding Fathers’ determination deliberately to build the capital on an unattractive mosquito-ridden swamp in order to deter the people’s representatives from lingering too long in the seat of power, with modern air conditioning and mosquito sprays, today’s representatives of the people prefer to put up with hideous summer humidity than relinquish their considerable influence.

When I lived in Washington DC, I ran my own food website, eatWashington - the world on your plate.

Its purpose was to acclimatise incomers from all nations, states, and walks of life into Washington as swiftly as possible. Knowing where to buy familiar national food favourites is the easiest way to settle in fast. So the web site directed its readers to sources for morcilla, Marmite, mangosteens and all manner of international specialities, with tips on what to do with them if they weren’t familiar to you. In this way, it also aimed to demystify for Americans other cultures through their cuisines and remove a fear of them which had been exacerbated by 9/11.

The CIA reputedly has a saying, “Lose a country, gain a restaurant.” I haven’t eaten as perfect a pho in Vietnam as I’ve regularly slurped along the Wilson Boulevard on the other side of the Potomac River, fondly known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But what Washington also gained was suburban communities of immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Latin America, and everywhere else the CIA had intervened and whose citizens also opened up mom-and-pop stores selling produce and products from their countries of origin. An equal eatWashington message was that in this capital, you could travel the world without needing a passport.

My own summer escape from the well-named Foggy Bottom was to South West France. Friends came to stay, eager to sample the local specialities. In the Dordogne, that would be duck. Duck, duck, duck, and more duck. Everyone wanted magret de canard, confit de canard, terrine de foie gras, and - the more intrepid diners - salade gésiers, a salad of confitted gizzards.

Salade gésiers

During the holiday weeks, I added to the web site a blog that kept tabs on how much duck we ate, using a device borrowed (stolen) from the Bridget Jones’s Diary series. Above each daily entry she listed just how many cigarettes, chocolates and other diet-breakers she had consumed. Each week, I began the blog with a tally of how many of which parts of the birds had been eaten to date. By the time I returned to DC at the end of August, I could swear I had developed webbed feet.

Offering visitors such a surfeit of fowl is not currently possible. This summer, avian flu had so affected French flocks they were being kept indoors. Ducks and geese for roasting were hard to come by. Hardly a magret to be seen. Duck and goose livers disappeared from the markets. (This, I’m sure, is excellent news to those who don’t understand that these birds don’t have a gag reflex in their throats and in nature gorge themselves to survive off their inflated livers during their long migration. It’s the grievous industrial, as opposed to artisanal, production methods that need to be terminated).

In the last month and a half since 1st October, 120 cases of avian flu have been confirmed so far in English poultry farms, and 254 since the start of the English outbreak last October. In parts of the country, pasture-roaming chickens are being forcibly kept indoors, and entire flocks culled at any sign of avian flu. It’s devastating for poultry farmers, since compensation for infected birds is paid only for the number of birds with avian flu established at the time of an official inspection. It is not retrospective. Yet avian flu can sweep through a flock, which requires culling long before an inspector appears.

Already the public is being warned that stocks of turkeys for Christmas are low.

Controlling the reach of the virus is a challenge. It spreads naturally among wild aquatic birds worldwide, and can quickly infect domestic poultry and other bird and animal species. The USA’s CDC, the Center for Diseases Control and Prevention, has been monitoring avian flu in the US. So far, viruses have been found in commercial and backyard birds in 29 states and in wild birds in 34 states.

Farmers and vets talk of new viruses emerging with global warming. Who knows what will surface with the continuing melting of glaciers and the permafrost in Arctic regions such as Russia, China, Greenland, Alaska, and Eastern Europe, unlocking unfamiliar microbes?

Last December, at an industrial farm in southern Russia, 101,000 chickens began to die. Birds suddenly presented with the symptoms of avian flu: swollen heads, blue colouration of comb and wattles, lack of appetite, respiratory distress, diarrhoea and a significant drop in egg production. Tests discovered a previously unknown version of avian flu. 900,000 birds at the plant were slaughtered in days.

Bird flu viruses do not normally infect humans, although they can. But if they don’t subside, they will surely affect how domestic fowl are raised in the future.

Worldwide, 70 percent of chickens are industrially-produced, spending their brief lives indoors in dense conditions often far more squalid and cruel than in this photo. Intensely-farmed chickens are profitable, a valuable global commodity worth $310.7 billion in 2020.

Allowing chickens to wander in the fresh air can expose them to contact with wild birds which may be carriers of virus. But while migratory wild birds are blamed, it’s more likely that conditions in intensive farms are a potential cauldron of deadly virus development - and in all animals farmed industrially.

Moving outdoor chickens indoors may become the ‘new normal’. Experience shows that once a ‘temporary’ system becomes established, it’s difficult to turn the clock back to when procedures were more time-consuming and expensive.

Let’s hope avian flu doesn’t lead to the rearing of fowl indoors becoming permanent. If it does, legislation must be in place - in the UK where large-scale, intensive farms with upwards of 40,000 birds are on the increase, and, if post-Brexit Britain is hoping to trade with them, in China and the US in particular where intensive farming has long been the norm, to ensure that poultry isn’t going to suffer.

I’m not holding my breath.

There is no one single carved-in-stone recipe for roasting a chicken. Simon Hopkinson offers one of the best. He is the uncelebrity chef other chefs swear by. If you only own one cookbook, make it Roast Chicken & Other Stories, voted the most useful cookbook ever by a panel of chefs, food writers, and consumers. Drop his name and in cooking company you’ll be looked at with respect.

110g/4oz good butter, at room temperature
1.8kg/4lb free-range chicken
Salt and pepper
1 lemon
Several sprigs of thyme or tarragon or both
1 fat garlic clove, peeled and crushed

Preheat oven to 230C/450F.

Smear the butter all over the bird. Put the chicken in a roasting tin that will accommodate it with room to spare. Season liberally with salt and pepper and squeeze over the juice of the lemon. Put the herbs and garlic inside the cavity, together with the squeezed out lemon halves.

Roast the chicken 10-15 minutes. Baste, then turn the oven down to 375F/190C. 

Roast a further 30-45 minutes with occasional basting. The bird should be golden brown all over with a crisp skin and have buttery, lemon juices of a nut-brown (not pink, which indicates it isn’t cooked) colour in the tin.

Turn off the oven leaving the door ajar and leave the chicken to rest for at least 15 minutes before carving to enable the flesh to relax. 

Carve the chicken in the roasting pan so it gets covered in the juices. Spoon more over each serving.