The French housewife mixes chopped fresh pork or pure pork sausage meat with eggs and herbs to stuff a big fat fowl, she poaches it with vegetables and a bouquet of herbs and the result is that poule au pot which good King Henry of Navarre wished that all his subjects might eat on every Sunday of the year. Or perhaps the same housewife will cook her chicken without a stuffing and serve it with a dish of rice and a cream sauce; or if it is a plump young bird, she will roast it simply in butter and serve it on the familiar long oval dish with a tuft of watercress at each end and the buttery juices in a separate sauce-boat. The farmer's wife, faced with an old hen no longer of use for laying, will (if she has inherited her grandmother's recipes and has a proper sense of the fitness of things) bone the bird, stuff it richly with pork and veal and even, perhaps, truffles if it is for a special occasion, and simmer the bird with wine and a calf's foot to make a clear and savory jelly, so that the old hen will be turned into a fine and handsome galantine fit for celebrations and feast days.
