The Perdue Chicken Cookbook

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,

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