Here comes the sun, there it goes again. In between, the day. The sun peeks above the koppie over there, the cock crows on the werf across the road; a scruffy Jack Russell yaps in reply, her bark quickly stilled by a blunt retort from Rassie, the Boerboel next door.

Then you think, not for the first time: why do city people look at you skeef when you wave at them from your car? In the dorp, when you go to buy diesel for the tractors, everyone waves at you and you wave back at everyone. It’s considered impolite not to. Then you go to Cape Town and suddenly you’re a weirdo who waves at strangers. Must say, it gets a bit much when you’re stuck in traffic on Philip Kgosana Drive in peak hour and there are so many people to greet that your wrist aches. You get so many glares, grimaces and puzzled faces that you honestly wonder why you bother. And so you sit there, like a bewildered bokkie in the rifle sights, yearning to be back on your Karoo stoep.

Where, before you think about breakfast, you think about supper. You had chops for lunch (okay and for breakfast), so maybe ring the changes a little. You venture into the kitchen to take one of the chickens that you slaughtered in May out of the freezer. Should be ready to cook by six o’clock when you come back from dosing the sheep.

Roast chicken has always been a favourite, ever since you were this high. Not a city chicken, injected with water to make it seem more of a chicken than it is. A “free-range”, “organic” chicken – you grin at the city-slicker words – only grain-fed, wouldn’t say ka-pawk to a goose; a chook (to use your northern English ancestors’ word for it) that spent its days pecking away merrily in Farmer Brown’s pastoral idyll, none of which is even close to the truth.

When your nephew went to England for his gap year – whatever that is – in 2017 he WhatsApped wide-eyed about the sight of chickens the size of turkeys in the supermarkets; even the “small” ones were bigger than the average size in South Africa, he said. But then he cooked them and they shrank back to South African size.

Slaughtering a chicken has never been an issue, ever since your dad, back in the old mining town where you grew up, suddenly grabbed one in the corner of the back yard where it was blithely pecking at mielie kernels, with not a clue that its end was nigh, and before you knew it he had it held down on a wooden block, yelling, “Come on, hold it down!”, and you did, wincing and trying not to cry, while he brought the axe down. The sight of its severed head falling to the ground and the rest of the animal getting up and running zig-zag all over the yard was not something a little boy will ever forget, even when he’s an old man on his stoep with his whiskey and his thoughts.

It was hard to look Henry in the eye after that. Henry was the pet chicken, a status which gave him special privileges. Like, he wouldn’t be for the chop. Or would he?

You found out one Sunday lunch. Particularly delicious was the roast chicken that day, but why was mom looking furtive, and why did they keep glancing at each other secretively? Then it dawned on you, and you looked at the thigh and drumstick on your plate. The leg was quite fetching, clearly this chook had lived a good, well-fed life. It could only be Henry. And that’s when you knew that food – eating it, and cooking it – would be paramount in your life; you decided in an instant that you were okay with it. So you said something like, “well, he tastes really good”, and carried on eating your lunch.

That Henry was in fact a girl was never discussed. Maybe it’d been short for Henrietta. Either way, Henry was my First Chicken, and it’s been a life-long love affair ever since. There have been many Henrys since that early awakening of my appreciation of this most versatile of meats. Just as the egg that precedes the chicken (now that we’ve established that) has endless uses in cooking, so the flesh of the creature that created the egg (oops, there goes that argument again) can be used in a world of guises.

Roasted or poached, the result is quite different. Seasoned and buttered, a halved onion or lemon stuffed into its cavity with some thyme or rosemary, a garlic clove or two, and roasted in foil in a hot oven for an hour before removing the foil for the skin to crisp; suprême of chicken (an old-fashioned cut of the breast, skin on, with the thick part of the wing attached) and done the way they used to do them in old hotel dining rooms, golden and sublime; a filleted breast poached in a court-bouillon; slowly braised chicken which is then shredded for a pie filling; Chinese chicken with cashews; chicken and prawn curries; a chicken potjie, tagine, casserole, terrine, pâté; there are probably more recipes for chicken than anything else in the kitchen repertoire, across almost every cuisine. Minced finely and passed through a sieve, seasoned and blended with cream, and you can form quenelles to be poached in lightly simmering water; they’re ready as soon as they float to the top.

In Karoo yards and on the werf of every farm, and in the yards of modest township houses throughout the land, is the cluck of chickens and the cock’s crow at dawn. Chicken is a common denominator, eaten by hipsters and yuppies off the deli shelf and served in posh ways at their soirees; cold braaied chicken drumsticks packed for school lunches or turned into chicken mayo sandwiches; walkie-talkies bought in their frozen bulk and stewed into succulent moreishness in pots on the shanty stove. Chicken tikka is the UK High Street staple; chicken akhni redolent of turmeric/borrie is as Cape as it gets; and how would Sandton, Ballito and City Bowl denizens manage without a Woolies roast chicken at least once a week?

Lockdown Recipe of the Day: Rustic Chicken Liver and Bacon Pâté

And, yes, we do know that mass/battery farming methods for the vast bulk of South Africa’s chicken market are grotesque, and yes, if you have any kind of reasonable budget at all it is advisable to avoid these and spend more on a creature that has not been treated cruelly and then slaughtered. This cannot be stated more strongly. But…..

But this will not, and cannot, change, as long as there are millions of South Africans whose budgets give them no choice but to buy those very chickens. Let’s get real: the poorest cannot even afford that, only the aforementioned well-heeled, and even they might find themselves having to buy the cheaper cuts once they get to what should have been their retirement and realise that they can’t afford to. But that’s another very long story that will unfold for most of us in the fullness of time.

On our Karoo stoeps we see these things and we know these things, because in these towns you don’t go to Woolies for a roast chook; you shop at the local supermarkets, cheek by jowl with everyone in town, from the doctor and the Steers franchise owner to the farmers who’ve come in for their weekly shop and the denizens of Lingelihle and Michausdal, as my town’s townships are called, because the “locations” are still there, the poverty is still there, and there’s zero sign of it going away. And you get looked at the way you get looked at when you’re getting looked at by someone who thinks you’re a rich man, and if only they knew that sometimes you go for the cheaper cuts too.

On our stoeps we know that foibles and fads are for those who can afford to be gluten-free and lactose-intolerant and I-only-eat-organic and is-that-beef-grain-fed-or-grass-fed. That when things are tight, a little pack of frozen chicken livers goes a hell of a long way, and nobody ever asks if they’re organic. (Do they?) And that chicken breast fillets are cheaper than other cuts and there’s no waste; and if you slice pockets into them and give them a stuffing they will reward you well, especially if you add breadcrumbs to the mix.

Chicken Coconut Curry in a Wok

You learn that life is capable of upending you, of confounding and undoing your compass, whether you like it or not, and it’s how you deal with that that might make you or break you. And that there’s something to be said for appreciating those stars up there when you turn the house lights off at midnight, of relishing the moments of camaraderie and nonsense-talking at the braai, and of telling that old story again because it always gets a laugh and brings a smile to the gathered few.

On your Karoo stoep, you think about things. You see everything; the city slicker passing through town uncomprehending, or seeing only the hotel, the airbnb, the monument and the national park. Flinching when they leave town via the townships, and not stopping to buy something from the roadside wire sellers, even though that small interruption may have fed a family for a week. From your Karoo stoep you see that life is not always the way you want to see it. DM

Read ‘Roadside Ry-Go and a Scrunched Coke Can’, ‘Sympathy for the Bully’ and other tales of food and the Karoo in Tony Jackman’s foodSTUFF (Human & Rousseau), a cookbook-cum-memoir with essays about life and food, illustrated by 60 recipes, which was nominated for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (2018) in the category for best food writing. Book enquiries: [email protected]