I had a little affair with an older woman over the weekend.

Sometimes one becomes a bit bored with a plump breast and well rounded thigh and longs for something with a bit of depth and character. Someone who rewards you well for the extra care and attention you lavish upon her. Whose charms aren't reliant on young tender flesh that is oh so common, but upon an ability to give herself all to you if you know how to treat her right, with love, tenderness and patience. An older women will not surrender to you in a shorter courtship, that someone younger would fall for in as little as half an hour. You have to want an older women and treat her right, as Aretha Franklin would say, with RESPECT.

It was my wife that started the whole thing. We had my kids coming over to celebrate one of their birthdays. The birthday boy himself is very fond of one of her soups called krupnik, which is essentially a barley soup that relies on good homemade chicken stock for its character. My wife had been telling me that in Poland, they like to use an old boiling fowl to make the stock with, but here in Australia she has to settle for chicken bones and pieces from young chickens. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but D was hanging out for a taste from her memory.

Well, we were at the Queen Victoria Market on Saturday morning, Melbourne's premier food market and I knew exactly where to get hold of an older bird for her soup. We battled our way through the mid morning crowd to the specialist chicken shops and purchased a 1.5 kg bird for $5. To someone who pays around $18 for a free range bird of the same size that seemed like a complete steal. But still it would be too much to pay if you didn't know how to look after it.

As a chicken ages, its flesh becomes increasingly tough, especially the active leg muscles. But what it loses in tenderness it gains in flavour. An older bird acquires a gelatinous quality that is only fully released by long, slow braising or poaching. The bird itself retains flavour and the liquid in which it was cooked will carry the very essence of the chicken. Once it was very common to cook with old birds as they first had to carry out egg laying duties, but in modern times we breed birds specifically for their tender meat, which cannot survive a long slow cook without turning stringy and losing all its flavour. But because all we can get nowadays is chicken bred to be tender, many of us look with disdain upon boiling fowl, as evidenced by a story from Renaudet, a French chef and author.

One of my friends, a French senator, once declared, in front of the cook of a mutual acquaintance, that an old hen was good for nothing except enriching the stock of a pot au feu. To show him how wrong he was, Mlle. Marthe, the cook, created the following dish and our gourmet freely admitted his error.

The dish was called Senator's Braised Hen and was essentially an old hen slowly braised with potatoes, bacon and onions for about three hours. With our chicken, we slowly poached it for three hours also; depending on the age and condition of the bird it can take from two to four hours to cook. After we had poached the bird for the requisite time we removed it from the stockpot and left it to cool for another dish, which turned out to be a pasta frittata. Our daughter M spotted it and ripped a drumstick from it and as she ate it said how tasty it was, then ripped the other leg and devoured that too. Of course I snuck a taste of the meat and it was completely different to a young bird. Even after three hours of cooking it had good texture, plenty of flavour and my hands almost stuck to the meat it was so sticky. All my children commented on how tasty the soup was; it was just the stock seasoned and served with noodles, but it had such a depth of flavour and a real stickiness to it that you can only get from a good homemade veal stock.

Maybe we should all spend a bit of time with an older woman, her charms are all there for the taking.