Chicken Feet! Tell me where to eat!

Passport & Plate - Stewed Chicken Feet

South Africa | Sunday, March 1, 2015 | flickr photos

Ingredients
Several pounds of chicken feet (frozen or fresh)
curry powder
salt
black pepper
turmeric
garlic
bay leaf
water

Optional veggies, as available:
carrots
celery
onions
potatoes

 

How to prepare this recipe
Wash chicken feet and trim claws, if needed. Place in a large stockpot and cover with water, firing up burner to a high heat. Add several cloves of garlic and chopped vegetables, making sure water covers all. Season with salt, pepper, curry powder and turmeric to your tastes.

Bring to a boil and then lower the heat to simmer for several hours until the chicken feet and biggest veggies are tender. Serve on top of rice or corn meal "pap" (traditional South African side dish.)

 

The story behind this recipe
The summer of 2014, I travelled to Kliptown, South Africa, to teach photography to high school students at the Kliptown Youth Project. Kliptown is one of the poorest informal settlements in Soweto (i.e. a "shantytown") where the majority of residents live in hand-built homes with no municipal services like electricity or indoor plumbing. The 55,000 residents, for example, have to fetch water for washing and cooking from 5 communal water pumps about the sprawling neighborhood. Our students all walked to their schools, several miles a day, because there is no school inside the settlement. One of the services provided by the KYP is to cook and serve one hot meal a day to any child who comes to the building, as well as prepared sandwiches for them to take to school with them in the mornings for their lunch.

One of the dishes prepared several times a week that was much loved by our students was stewed chicken feet, a traditional South African dish, usually served with "pap," a sort of fluffy corn meal mush (that is often mixed with something else for flavor, such as spinach or squash.) Chicken is one animal protein that is easily produced locally, due to the fact that it doesn't require a lot of space to raise chickens (they are running around the village freely!) Also sometimes grilled or barbecued, chicken feet is also a dish you'll see in local restaurants.

Although foodie culture in the U.S. is getting back to a more traditional "nose to tail" approach of using the whole animal, I have never seen chicken feet on any menu here in the States (although I know it's a popular dish among Chinese as well) as our culture does not favor such labor intensive and tendonous cuts of meat. Often, such parts of an animal go to waste here or are used for dog or cat food. I appreciated the importance of this dish as a healthy, nutritious meal for our students, to fuel their growth and give them the energy for school and the chores they all perform in their families.