Much ink has flowed recently about urban chicken farming. Some folks seem eager to build expansive coops in the backyard and stock them with egg-laying fowl.
Others worry about all those feathers and all that clucking.
Me, I’m not worried about the clucking. Back in the early 1990s, I was living in a railroad walk-up on Avenue C and 2nd Street in New York (a part of town that is now considered part of the tony East Village, but back then was known as an especially barren corner of Alphabet City), next door to a vacant, weedy, trash-strewn lot that was home to a vibrant colony of chickens, roosters, and who knows what else.
The cock-a-doodle-dooing, which fired up just an hour or so after the last partygoer dregs had been pushed out the door of The World nightclub on the other side of the lot (now a Pentecostal church), was just part of the urban din — ambulance sirens, freestyle pop music, bus brakes, car alarms, asphalt-drilling ConEd workers, kids on sugar highs.
It wasn’t clear who, if anyone, owned the chickens. But they seemed completely uninterested in leaving their tiny, bountiful urban landscapes, where they’d peck at scraps of stale bread tossed by stoop-sitting grandmothers and nuzzle through half-empty bags of Funyuns abandoned by late-night munchers. Once I saw a pair of chicks nuzzling the neck of a toppled 40-ounce bottle of Olde English Malt Liquor.
I became used to those fat, frantic hens and the first- light sounds of their lordly rooster, so much so that when I moved to the west side of town, I began to habitually oversleep.
Of course, as proximate as I was to the chickens, their eggs were never in my culinary equation. I wouldn’t have even known where to look. These days, urban chickens (never roosters, which just aren’t welcome) are all about the eggs.
If I’d had access to the eggs of those urban chickens back then, I’d have made this egg bake.
Freestyle Frittata
Serves 4.
Ingredients
1/4 cup salt pork, diced
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 medium-sized hard spicy sausage, diced
2 serrano peppers, seeded, ribbed and chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can black beans, drained
1 1/2 cups day-old bread, torn into chunks
8 large fresh eggs, beaten
1 cup white cheese (such as cojita), grated
Directions
Preheat oven to 300 degrees. In a medium-size oven-proof skillet over medium heat, render salt pork until crispy. Remove with a slotted spoon, leaving fat behind. Add onion and sausage, and cook until sausage is just crispy, about 5 more minutes. Add peppers and cook 2 minutes. Add garlic and black beans, cook 2 minutes. Add bread and stir to coat. Pour in eggs, stir in cheese and cook 4 minutes. Transfer skillet to oven to finish cooking, about 15 minutes more. Allow fritatta to cool 3 minutes before inverting skillet over plate. Slice into wedges and serve with sauteed greens.
