Frangoed in the land of piri piri

David Sherman

The story starts when I was waist high. My earliest poultry memories – don’t we all have memories of chicken little? Or big? – was of my grandmother, not much larger than a few hens herself, with a bleached dead chicken collapsed on her lap. She was plucking the ends of feathers with a tweezers one by one by one.

My late, great aunt Rose annually told the tale of her chasing live chickens down Rachel St. in Montreal. They were brought home live in wood cages and unceremoniously strangled. Unless they made a break for it as these guys did. To no avail. They ended up on a plate.

Chicken was the Friday night special every week of my life at home. Roasted or baked. Deader than dead. Cooked into the third dimension.

But factory farming – flavour-sucking, chemically enhanced size and growth -- was not yet ubiquitous so a twice-cooked chicken had flavour. The bones could be mined for sweet marrow.

Fridays were double headers. One bird for the oven, one for the soup. Boiled chicken to be consumed Saturday or Sunday. Its flavour had been simmered into the soup but it was, “Eat it or starve.” Greek cuisine salvages boiled birds with rock salt, lemon and ouzo, a little exotic for our home.

Colonel Sanders’ arrival was a revelation. Until he admitted the corporate geniuses had screwed up his recipe – 11 secret herbs and spices meant salt and cheap birds -- and he wouldn’t eat it, just pitched it, his avuncular beard under contract.

There was something called honey-fried chicken, crunchy and juicy and everything a Friday night bird wasn’t. It was a short-lived franchise, killed by the Colonel’s relentless advertising.

But, moving into Montreal to my first home and first full-time job, there was and still is, Chalet Barbecue. An institution. With wondrous French fries. There were also Chateau Barbecue, Côte St. Luc Barbecue, Lucerne Barbecue, variations on a theme. Dinner for a tax-free $3.25. And it was juicy and smoky and cheap.

And the metastasizing chain St. Hubert Barbecue, a restaurant that found a way to serve chicken at twice the price with half the flavour. With lots of sauce to discourage blandness and drown frozen fries, a hell of an advertising budget and a fleet of tiny cars to deliver cold chicken right to your door before Uber and Door Dash.

The Chalet is still there, frozen in time. The chicken hasn’t changed, the menu hasn’t changed, the décor hasn’t changed, the staff hasn’t changed, just moving slower. The place is always full, the chicken is still great.

When kitchen doors swing open, you’ll get a glance of a guy or two with cleavers mechanically hacking smoked birds and sliding chicken parts onto plates. Their limbs remain attached.

But nothing and no one stands still and I moved and discovered Portuguese chicken in a Portuguese neighbourhood in Mile End before it became too trendy for Portuguese people, rotisserie chicken or me.

Rows of chickens rotated in the windows of a couple of places on St. Viateur St., home of Montreal bagels. You could buy a chicken and hot bagel feast for a few bucks.

These weren’t supermarket chickens, injected with who knows what and bathed in salt and cooked until the chickens came home to roost. You could even get a thick, juicy chicken sandwich on white diabetic Portuguese buns for a few bucks and sit on a bench or the church steps and lunch in the sun. Or take it home with 50 cents worth of potatoes roasted in chicken drippings. Saturated fat never tasted so good.

One weird day, I said, “wait, I can do this myself.” My wife bought me a clay baker, all the rage at the time. I learned to therapeutically massage a chicken with a little this and that and it made beautiful, juicy poultry music in less than an hour. Chickens larger and less expensive and better than anything I could buy.

My life as a wannabe poultry maestro began.

But the game changed. By the 80s, chicken factories and chicken torture dominated. Birds were blasted with antibiotics and growth hormones and grew immobile as well as fatter and plumper and tasteless. I broiled them and baked them and roasted them and apologized to them. The skin tasted great but the meat tasted like mucilage.

The Portuguese restaurants on St. Laurent Blvd. still had it on me. They grilled birds over fire. The chickens were beyond caring. They had been thankfully put out of their misery and tasted pretty good until expedience demanded patrons had to be fed fast and moved out for the next shift. Chicken was served as quickly as McDonald’s fed us ersatz burgers so they precooked the birds, let them dry on the edge of the grill and then threw them on the fire again when ordered. Dry chick redux.

My love affair with Portuguese chicken went the way of most of my love affairs and I went back to eating birds at home and hunting for the poor bastards that weren’t tortured until they were suicidal.

There was no cock-a-doodle-do. They were screaming, “Uncle.”

Yes, there were birds that had been able to walk, weren’t drugged and had flavour and to honour them I learned to smoke them on a Weber with charcoal and wood chips and heaven on a plate returned. Though smoking was more in my imagination or maybe a result of what I had smoked.

Real smoking means letting the smoke do its thing for a long time and keeping the temperature on the barbecue relatively low, an art beyond me. So, I kind’ve smoasted them. Or Roked them. Smoky flavour but roasted by high heat I couldn’t control. The meat turned reddish from the smoke and chicken heaven was shared by me and the bird, though it was beyond caring.

Trouble was, it took a lot of time and energy to smoast or roke a bird but my passion for chicken was unsated.

The Portuguese came to the rescue again. I had to cross the Atlantic to find it but there it was – the miracle of spatchcocking. Even the word makes me salivate. You cut the bird down the back and spread it like a big, white butterfly, close your eyes and press down on its breast until you hear the bones crack, say a little prayer, and dinner is nigh.

It was good. Under a broiler for whatever time, after leaving it out on the counter to chambré like fine wine, and you were a step closer to joining the birds in chicken heaven. But I was not there yet.

I took a cast iron grill pan, preheated with the oven to 425. I massaged and oiled the bird, seasoned and blasted it with lemon juice, apologizing all the while and when the oven said, “Do me, Baby.” I slid the fractured creature onto the pan and heard it sizzle and I knew chicken heaven was only 25 minutes away. And, unless I used a Loblaw’s “Two chickens for $12” ersatz hen, I were in poultry nirvana. Or so I thought.

Turned out, I was a poultry plebeian, a babe in the chicken-cooking coop. The Portuguese still ruled the roost.

In Portugal, mass-farming torture is not routine. Hens are not pumped with chemicals, chilled in water, overgrown and tasteless. They’re less than a kilo, often raised outdoors. No Schwarzenegger-pumped thighs and implant-sized breasts. The little guys are, if not treated with love, at least a modicum of respect. They are not precooked. In fact, the best Tascas, traditional Portuguese eateries, might warn tourists there will be a wait. It’s an 11th Commandment. Thy bird shall not be pre-cooked. You will have to just sit and busy yourself people-watching, Portuguese listening, munching the “couvert” – prosciutto, fish paste, olives, bread -- man, it’s hell -- while the bird is slowly grilled over fire. Yes, you can look at your phone. Again.

Sometimes, to finish, the seared little guy is cut in pieces and put back on the grill to make sure it’s perfectly done, juices interred, and then plucked and dropped on a plate, salad, potatoes, vegetables added. Dinner for the price of a chemically-enhanced supermarket-ravaged bird.

The little chicken is in heaven and you’re close. It’s Portugal’s national dish, frango piri piri, the latter being the fiery sauce its basted with.

Once you’ve been frangoed, there’s no going back.