Roast Chicken (Japanese Style)

History

For most of its history in Japan, chickens functioned as living clocks; sacred and useful, they spent centuries on the safer side of the kitchen knife. But following a long negotiation between Buddhist prohibition, agricultural pragmatism and endless need for protein, birds once treated as ceremonial creatures became Japan's most widely consumed meat and the subject of accomplished cooking. Yakitori, as known today, first appeared in Japan during the Meiji period, with street vendors setting up stalls to sell freshly-grilled chicken skewers, since chicken was not allowed to be eaten until the Meiji period due to Japan's Buddhist heritage. Chicken meat was expensive at this time, so yakitori's roots began with serving the bird's offal. Every part was used — feet, giblets, organs. Chicken feet were prized rather than discarded, their collagen making broths rich enough to gel when cooled.

As the Meiji period (1868–1912) changed everything when the modernization movement lifted the meat-eating prohibition and restaurants specializing in Japanese chicken began to appear in cities, Western culinary traditions—particularly the roasted whole bird—merged with Japanese ingredient philosophy. The latter half of the 1800s saw renewed cross-Pacific contact after Japan's opening to the West, bringing Japanese foodways into conversation with American domestic cooking. The preference for giblets and feet, once driven by scarcity, became a marker of culinary sophistication and resourcefulness.

In 1914, sisters Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Sara Bosse—half-Chinese on their mother's side—published the Chinese-Japanese Cook Book. Prior to this, Winnifred Eaton was a successful fiction writer under the Japanese-American pseudonym Onoto Watanna; by passing as another ethnic group, she found more success at a time of heightened anti-Chinese sentiment. Sara Bosse and her sister Winnifred Eaton adapted Chinese and Japanese dishes to appeal to white middle-class American women entertaining at home. The Japanese meat and fish recipes are simple even though several use rabbit, pheasant, venison, pigeon, even whale; the vegetable dishes more Chinese than Japanese. Their "Roast Chicken (Japanese Style)" exemplifies this adaptation: a roasted whole bird rather than yakitori's grilled skewers, yet honoring the Japanese aesthetic of waste-free cooking by incorporating feet and giblets into the gravy. The recipe preserves in American domestic form the philosophy that drove Japanese street food: that every part of the bird has culinary value and flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 whole young, tender chicken
• chicken feet
• chicken giblets
• rice
• onion
• 1 pinch mixed spices
• salt
• pepper
• 1 dash cayenne
• sweet potatoes

Instructions

1. Clean and singe the young chicken.
2. Boil the feet until the scabs scale off.
3. Place the feet with the giblets to boil slowly until tender.
4. Make a stuffing by combining rice boiled dry in chicken gravy with chopped onion, a pinch of mixed spices, salt, pepper, and a dash of cayenne.
5. Fill the body of the chicken with the stuffing and sew it closed.
6. Roast the chicken for an hour or longer, depending on its age.
7. Make a gravy from the stock of the giblets.
8. Chop the cooked giblets fine and add to the gravy.
9. Serve the roasted chicken with roasted sweet potatoes and the giblet gravy.