Fowlsew

The remains of the Christmas fowl have already been rendered down into soup and drunk with Sharwood's medium egg noodles, so it is time to notice the sewing of the ends ceremony which preceded the first cooking.

Make sage & onion stuffing - using ready shelled organic hazels this year, the few that had been seen in their shells not looking too clever. Stuff bird, not too tightly, stuffed stuffing being apt to turn out a bit rubbery. Put the balance of the stuffing in a white enamel pie dish and cover with a good layer of streaky bacon, to be cooked underneath the fowl - with the variation this year of adding maybe a table spoon of rape seed oil to the stuffing before the bacon, in a bid to keep it moist when cooked.

Sew up head end of fowl, using equipment pictured bottom left and the needle middle right. Unfortunately, I had mislaid my first class needle holding pliers (complete with a selection of grooves for better grip on the needle) and had to use the second class pliers from Kemptown (see reference 1). I also had to settle for a straight, regular sewing needle, rather than the half circle (the full circle being about the size of one of our 10p pieces) needle which my father used to use for the job. Worse still, the green packing thread which I had sourced with some difficulty some years ago (see reference 2) had gone AWOL and I had to use regular sewing thread, too thin & sharp for comfort for this sort of work. Despite all, I managed quite a neat, continuous blanket stitch, or at least what I call a blanket stitch. Far too lazy to knot each stitch separately in the way of a proper surgeon.

On the way, I found that the near needle point pliers made some aspects of thread manipulation a lot easier than they would have been, with fingers, which are cunning but clumsy for thread, particularly when manipulating the carcase has made them a bit greasy. With three hands the pliers would have been just the ticket: perhaps that is what the apprentices & (in the last resort) nurses are for.

Sew up nether regions. The second class pliers turned out to be quite good for pulling the stumps of quills which had been broken by the plucking machine, now visible middle right. (The fowl had been sold as woodland reared, organic, etc, etc but I don't suppose that even all stretched to hand plucking).

Cook fowl. As it turned out, the stuffing cooked inside the bird was not quite as good as the stuffing cooked outside, it usually being the other way around. Maybe I should add the rape seed oil to the whole lot.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=kemptown.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=packing+thread.