Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991 TAG: 9102170052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You would eat those little macaronis so fast, the Pasta Rights people wouldn't even have time to picket the courthouse.
But that didn't happen.
It was a cockfight that was raided three weeks ago, and 46 roosters became political prisoners. They're being housed in solitary confinement because 46 fighting cocks in one cage would quickly reduce one another into a pile of so much chow mein. With feathers. Rice extra.
Seems simple enough to decide the chickens' fate, and just about everybody but lawyers and judges in Bedford knows it.
General District Judge J.C. Crumbley III last week sentenced the rowdy roosters to a mass chicken execution.
Rooster owners appealed the death sentence. The legal fricassee will likely linger until May.
We have but one solution.
Barbecue the peckers.
Roosters are chickens. Chickens are food.
Not the best food, warn the poultry pros at Virginia Tech, but food. What do you want for confiscated goods? Sturgeon eggs?
Generally, we cross Plymouth Rock hens with Cornish cocks to produce those meaty, plump birds with built-in pop-out thermometers in their breasts and bags of guts stuffed inside the hole where the neck used to be. Incredible genetics, that.
Fighting cocks are considerably leaner. They have much less fat. And they cost as much as $1,500 each.
"They are," says one Tech expert, "tougher than shoe leather."
Jim Harmon whistles softly when he hears the price.
"Colonel Sanders in a golden suit," he murmurs.
The secret would be in the soaking: "We could do it. We'd have to cook 'em real slow, though," says the man who makes his living over hot coals at Jimmy's Outdoor B-B-Q's in Roanoke.
Harmon would soak the former fighters overnight in salt water, assuming of course they've already been slaughtered and plucked and gutted. He'd throw a little lemon in there, too.
"We'll leave the skin on. In the morning, we'll smoke it for an hour and a half, maybe two hours with hickory and mesquite," he says. "We'll have to baste them the whole time, right away, in a tomato-based barbecue sauce."
Sounds so good you can almost smell those prisoners roasting now.
"You could probably get an eight-piece cut out of each. If we serve baked beans and slaw, we could get away with four people per bird," says Harmon.
That's 184 people dining on 46 jailbirds.
Mary Gardner might be able to stretch them even further at Goode's Country Kitchen, outside Bedford, where she works.
"They really make better chicken salad than anything else," she says. "They are tough little babies."
Mary suggests we boil the heck out of them, and chop them or grind them. Chopped chicken is more popular for salads, she cautions.
Regardless.
Jim Harmon and Mary Gardner each said they'd be willing to prepare a couple of test bantams for judge and prosecutor to taste test.
Justice is served.
by CNB