lsanderson | Wednesday Food in the NY Times...

Now, a Chicken in Black
By ELAINE LOUIE

PET a Silkie chicken and you understand how it got its name. The feathers are fine and flutter in wisps in the breeze.

With a walnut-shaped crown of plumage, blue earlobes and feathers that come in a variety of colors, it’s a striking-looking bird that’s often raised for show.

Breeders also like them because they will hatch other birds’ eggs.

“They are such good moms,” said Frank R. Reese Jr., the founder of Good Shepherd Turkey Ranch in Lindsborg, Kan., who breeds Silkies for show. “They’ll sit on anything and hatch anything. They’ll hatch ducks, turkeys, chickens.”

Deprived of their striking outerwear, though, Silkies are far less appealing. They have bluish-gray skin, pitch-black bones and dark beige flesh (they’re sometimes called black-skinned chickens). They’re a scrawny pound or two, plucked, and are usually sold with the head and feet attached (with five toes, not the usual four).

Yet Asian cooks love them for their deep, gamy flavor, even in the breast meat. And with the nation’s Asian population growing, sales have soared.

Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, sells about 10,000 Silkies a year, up from a few hundred 10 years ago, when the hatchery first started raising the little birds, said Bud Wood, an owner.

“The majority are sold for ornamental purposes, but there’s a big market in San Francisco, where there are Asians, and in Minneapolis, where there’s a Hmong market,” Mr. Wood said. Japanese, Cambodians and Koreans also eat the Silkie, he said. More

Recipe: Black-Skinned Chicken Soup
Recipe: Black-Skinned Chicken Slow-Cooked in Coconut Sauce
Recipe: Black-Skinned Chicken Slow-Cooked in Dark Soy Sauce

Sea Sends Distress Call in One-Note Chowders
By MOLLY O’NEILL

Stonington, Me.

DICK BRIDGES has big, calloused hands, hands that have been thickened by half a century of fishing, hands that can build a life and shape a community. They are not the sort of hands you expect to see mincing onions in a church kitchen. But on a recent Saturday evening Mr. Bridges grasped a flimsy knife, reached for a sack of yellow onions and launched into a soliloquy about fishing in America and the dish that tells the story: chowder.

The endlessly varied mélange that can banish chilblains and restore survivors of storms has never been merely a soup. Early Colonial versions called for fish to be layered along with onions, biscuits and water in a caldron; by the time Ishmael and Queequeg feasted on steaming bowls of the stuff, milk, cream and salt pork had found their way into the pot. Otherwise, the dish that helped Melville’s whalers tell time — “chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper” — changed very little for nearly 200 years.

Down Easters said that the more variety of fish in the pot, the “deepah the flavah.” Like most sons of sons of Maine fishermen, Mr. Bridges, 61, grew up eating fish stews that were as diverse and densely packed as the local waters.

Cod, haddock, white hake, halibut, cusk and dozens of other groundfish, fish that live near the ocean bottom, mingled with clams, shrimp, lobster and mussels under the creamy surface of the stew, cresting a puddle of yellow butter here, a slick of smoky pork fat there.

Today there is nothing but lobster to be fished commercially near Stonington. Lobster floats alone in the local chowder, pinking the cream and, in the mind of food lovers, perhaps elevating Everyman’s dish to luxury status. But when Mr. Bridges looks at a single species stew he sees a dangerously impoverished fishery. More

Recipe: Maine Fish Chowder
Recipe: Lobster Chowder

With Eggs, the Scent of a Shellfish
By MARK BITTMAN

OF all the dishes I ate for the first time in 2006, this one stands out. It’s amazing how good it is, how simple it is, how easy and fast it is. It’s also amazing how puzzled you must be hearing me say these things about scrambled eggs with shrimp. Have faith. More

Recipe: Scrambled Eggs With Shrimp

A Top Chef’s Kitchen Is Far Too Hot, Some Workers Say
By KIM SEVERSON and ADAM B. ELLICK

DANIEL BOULUD can’t stand to see a detail out of place. As pans slam around him during dinner service in the Upper East Side restaurant that bears his first name, he will pause to request that a spoon be polished. How best to marry braised endive to seared beef can absorb him as utterly as the lilies in the dining room that haven’t opened on schedule.

He’s also a man who has cultivated the news media over his 23 years in New York. He is quick to get on the phone with a writer and can engineer a smart publicity move, like creating the world’s most expensive hamburger, which won him worldwide attention in 2003.

Outside the restaurant, Mr. Boulud is known for his generosity. Last year he helped raise nearly $2 million, much of it for Citymeals-on-Wheels, on whose board he sits.

On top of all that, Mr. Boulud is a social animal. His fellow four-star chefs would vote him the guy most likely to lead the conga line.

In short, he is a perfectionist who is accustomed to being liked. All of which helps explain why Mr. Boulud, 51, cannot grasp why a group of restaurant-worker advocates keep showing up outside Daniel with a 12-foot inflatable cockroach, singing “We Shall Overcome” and chanting that he is a racist.

“Racism is a vicious charge,” Mr. Boulud said in an interview. “It is too easy to accuse someone of that, and it is very hard to defend yourself.”

And yet Mr. Boulud is being forced to do just that. In December, seven current and former employees filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing him of discrimination. Similar charges against Mr. Boulud are before the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. More

Food Stuff
In Tins, in Cups, Teas Are in Bloom
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

Miriam Novalle had to close her T Salon on East 20th Street last summer when the lease ran out, but that obviously did not discourage her.

She has replaced it with T Salon & T Emporium, a large showroom on the fourth floor at 134 West 26th Street.

Customers will find the same elaborate tea canisters and tea accessories and the more than 400 kinds of tea she sold before.

Among them are a number of flower teas, which burst into bloom in the teapot or a cup.

With the help of new investors, she has also opened T Salon, which serves teas and tea-based snacks on the lower level of the sleekly modern Té Casan shoe store at 382 West Broadway (Spring Street).

Ms. Novalle plans to open another T Salon in the Chelsea Market, 75 Ninth Avenue (15th Street), in about eight weeks.

It will have tea for sale, a full bar for tea-based cocktails, snacks developed by Allan Susser of Miami, and a machine that makes a satisfyingly frothy tea cappuccino at the touch of a button. More