Kitchen Notes: the Silkie Chicken -- Plus, "Welcome to the Party, Western Slowpokes"

You know, I'm seriously going to start a new category on this blog and call it "Welcome to the Party, Western Slowpokes" -- WTTPWS, maybe.

I keep running into blog posts or books or articles or whatever media in which some expert or enthusiast presents an item and gushes about how new and awesome it is. The item is usually something that's been used/eaten/enjoyed in Asia since Buddha was a baby. But since it took the expert/enthusiast until 2008 to figure it out, the thing is shiny new! An exciting discovery! Oooooooooooo!

Meanwhile, I'm sitting on the couch, rolling my eyes. The first time this happened was when I heard somebody on TV absolutely GUSH about the newly discovered wonders of green tea. I snorted and said to a friend, "New? Well, it took you long enough. My peeps have been drinking tea for freakin' 4000 years."

Anyway, look, somebody somewhere is probably going to be offended by this post or the new category or whatever. So here's a caveat: it's partially done for fun, and I don't mean every single Westerner is a slowpoke, and I know "Westerner" isn't really a good or accurate label anyway, blah blah blah, and if you didn't have a sense of humor you probably wouldn't be reading this blog anyhow.

So here is today's entry in the WTTPWS: the silkie chicken. The Kitchn blog has a whole "oooo, looky here!" post about this particular kind of chicken. Silkie chicken -- exciting and new, come aboard, we're expecting yooooooooou! Oops, sorry.

Yeah, so it's that old black-bone chicken. Big fat whoopty-doo. It's hard to get all rah-rah about a "new" thing if you've known about it all your life.

FYI, the Taiwanese name for the little clucker (I said CLucker, not the other thing, so calm down) does literally translate as "black-bone chicken." Yes, the entire chicken is dark, right down to the bones. Skin, flesh, bones, everything about it is black, everything except the external feathers, which are usually white. Ummm, yeah. Somehow the color composition of the animal is like a racial slur or something. I expect Al Sharpton to complain any minute now.

So, enough already. What do you DO with a black-bone chicken? I had some the last time I was in Taiwan, actually. The bird is best cooked as soup (UPDATE -- wheeeeeeee, the NY Times says so too, so it must be true . . .HA). At the end of the process, you have a gorgeous, rich chicken soup that's like molten gold. Some folks even think it's medicinal (but isn't all chicken soup kind of medicinal?). The meat ends up being "meh, so-so," but it's the soup you really want.

WTTPWS!