The Perdue Chicken Cookbook

Want to know a high stress situation? Try being a food writer and cookbook author, and then marry Frank Perdue. You come home from the honeymoon, everything has been wonderful and then…it’s time to Cook the First Meal! Frank wants to eat chicken and you’re supposed to be a good cook.I remember that afternoon so vividly. I knew he’d be coming home around six and that he’d be hungry. Now up until that day, I had always felt fairly confident in the kitchen. After all, I love cooking and trying new recipes is my favorite pastime. But cooking chicken for Frank Perdue? I began to get stage fright. As I was trying to find where the pots and pans were in his kitchen, I started calculating that there were probably few people in the world who’ve eaten chicken more times than my husband. "He’s been eating chicken almost daily for his entire life" I thought, "he likes it, he cares about it, and my cooking is about to be judged by a world class expert."As I rummaged around looking for the right herbs and spices＄and couldn’t find the ones I liked ＄ my stage fright grew worse. "This man must be one of the world’s greatest experts on cooked chicken," I thought to myself. "He’s attended dozens and dozens of chicken cooking contests, he’s been part of hundreds and hundreds of taste testings for Perdue products. Everywhere he goes, people know he likes chicken and the best chefs and hostesses in the world have served it to him." In my mind I ran through some of the times when together we’d driven an hour out of the way to go to a restaurant that cooked chicken particularly well, and how he always seemed to have lists of the restaurants he wanted to visit.