Pollo

Chicken in the Orvieto region is an expensive meat. The birds are generally free-range, in fact strongly resemble the best-quality free-range French chickens (poulets de Bresse) in that they have genuine flavour, obvious maturity (they’re big), and have well-developed legs without the over-large flaccid breasts of British poultry. They also come complete with every bit of them intact. Indeed butchers in Italy seem surprised when you ask them to clean the chicken. I imagine most Italian cooks are quite happy to do this job. Surprisingly, so are a large proportion of the guests at La Cacciata, in a volunteer class.