Roste Chicken with Bread Stuffing

This was another recipe from Medieval Cookery which was a Capon Roste. I did try to see if I could buy a Capon online and hearing how good they were I was tempted, but I hadn't realised that even the cheapest ones cost £25! If I was entertaining a large group of people and wanted to make a Medieval feast for them, then I would have probably gone for it. But with lockdown and now being in a Tier 3 category, entertaining a large crowd is a bad idea! So as it was just me and the partner, I decided to go for a regular chicken, I brought a nice one though. Chickens are a fair bit leaner than Capons, so I added plenty of butter to make up for it!

I did also alter the recipe slightly, because I'm not a big fan of eggs. It's generally the yolks that bother me, I don't like the texture of either runny or hard yolks, so I made a stuffing instead from leftover breadcrumbs (thank you Roman loaf), but kept all the herbs and currents the same. I also followed another recipe on there for Cherry sauce, as it was suggested to pair the chicken with a sauce and I had a bag of frozen cherries in the freezer. 

Something interesting I did learn, considering we now generally view chicken as a fairly cheap meat, was that this was considered a serious luxury during Medieval times. Any peasant wouldn't dream of removing something that could make more food, but it was a real status symbol for the rich to eat chicken because only they could afford to lose out on the eggs.

Ingredients

• 
  1 Chicken
• 65g chopped parsley
• 2 tbsp mint
• 2 tbsp rosemary
• 2 tbsp chopped sage
• 125g bread crumbs
• 32g currants
• 2 tbsp butter
• 100ml water
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp pepper

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180C (160C fan).
2. Place the chicken in a baking tray and spread 1 tbsp of butter over the skin. Sprinkle 1 tsp of salt and 1 tsp of pepper over it, then cover with tin foil and place in the oven for 1 hour and 30 minutes.
3. Mix the bread crumbs, parsley, mint, rosemary, sage and currants together, then add the water and 1tbsp of butter. Place in an oven proof dish.
4. When the chicken has finished cooking for the 1 hour and 30 minutes, raise the temperature to 200C (180C fan) and cook for another 20 minutes. Add the stuffing to the oven at this point and cook for 20 minutes.
5. Serve with Pandemain bread (see my earlier recipe for Medieval bread) and cherry sauce.