I remember that afternoon so vividly. I knew he'd be coming home around six and that he'd be hungry. Now up until that day, I had always felt fairly confident in the kitchen. After all, I love cooking and trying new recipes is my favorite pastime. But cooking chicken for Frank Perdue? I began to get stage fright. As I was trying to find where the pots and pans were in his kitchen, I started calculating that there were probably few people in the world who've eaten chicken more times than my husband. "He's been eating chicken almost daily for his entire life" I thought, "he likes it, he cares about it, and my cooking is about to be judged by a world class expert."
As I rummaged around looking for the right herbs and spices$and couldn't find the ones I liked $ my stage fright grew worse. "This man must be one of the world's greatest experts on cooked chicken," I thought to myself. "He's attended dozens and dozens of chicken cooking contests, he's been part of hundreds and hundreds of taste testings for Perdue products. Everywhere he goes, people know he likes chicken and the best chefs and hostesses in the world have served it to him." In my mind I ran through some of the times when together we'd driven an hour out of the way to go to a restaurant that cooked chicken particularly well, and how he always seemed to have lists of the restaurants he wanted to visit.
Help! My stage fright was getting still worse. The thirty year old oven didn't seem to be heating right, but I couldn't be sure because there wasn't any oven thermometer. The "elbow test," which our grandmothers used to use before the days of thermometers (you stick your elbow in the oven and feel how hot it is), told me that things weren't right, but I didn't know how far off the oven was so I didn't know how to compensate. As I rubbed my elbow with my other hand, I thought of Frank's reputation for being demanding. If you've seen the ad that we call "Boot Camp," you know what I mean. (He plays the part of a drill sergeant in this ad and teaches the new Perdue recruits the 57 quality points that they have to inspect — and then he's all over one recruit for missing what seems like an invisibly small hair.)
It's a funny thing, but when you start losing your confidence, you start asking some basic questions about what you're doing. Part of me was saying that cooking chicken is pretty simple; after all, I'd been doing it for most of my life. But another part of me realized when attempting to cook chicken for Frank the first time, that I knew very little of the basics of cooking chicken. Like, for example, what makes a chicken tender? How do you really know when it's done$and not over done? How do you get the best flavor? Should you salt before or after cooking?
In desperation, I made a two-part promise to myself. First, I'd let myself take the easy way out that first meal, and not even try to cook the chicken myself. Instead, dinner would be a never-fail salad, pasta (Frank loves pasta), plus store-bought fully-cooked Perdue Tenders. In return for letting myself off so easily, I'd make it my business from then on to learn how to make the best chicken every time. That meant asking Frank every question that popped into my head; checking with the food technologists who work for Perdue; getting tips from the farmers who grew the Perdue chickens; and systematically going through the thousands of recipes that Frank has in his files, trying a different one each night.
Dinner that night wasn't the show piece I would have liked to create, but it was good enough and Frank happens to love his own Tenders so the chicken part of the meal was a success. In the time since, I've tried to live up to the second part of the promise, the one about learning how to serve the best chicken every time.
In this book, I'd like to share with you the most useful cooking tips and the most appealing, most successful recipes developed by Perdue Farms over the last twenty years. The first chapter contains the kinds of information I wished I'd known from the beginning. You don't need to read this chapter, because chicken isn't that hard to cook; but there are tips in it that can save you time and money and that can enable you to cook with greater confidence. This chapter also has the latest tips on food safety.
The remaining chapters are organized, not by method of cooking or whether the food is an appetizer or salad or whatnot; but rather by the kind of occasion you're facing. You want to put some spark and variety into every day meals? You want to make the most of your microwave? Or you're in a hurry today? Maybe you need something that will please kids? Or you're dieting? You've got a bunch of leftovers? You have to cook for a hundred people tomorrow night? I tried to think of the kinds of situations in which you could need recipes and then I organized Frank's recipes around them. Jean Brillat- Savarin, the famous French gourmet, once said, "A chicken to a cook is like a canvas to a painter." Enjoy the recipes and tips that follow, and may they help you to feel the creativity and confidence that make cooking fun and eating a joy!
YOU DON'T HAVE TO WING IT!
LET FRANK TAKE YOU UNDER HIS.
Everything You Wanted or Needed to Know about
Cooking Chicken
Frank gets roughly 40,000 consumer letters a year. Half of these are requests for pamphlets, but many of the others are requests for information on selecting, storing, serving, or cooking his products.