Cutting Chicken for curries

My grandmother like all Sri Lankans loved to feed people. She also needed to have an abundance of food on the table. I remember once when we were in the kitchen together she was talking about cutting chicken.  At that time, you could only buy whole chickens, now, in modern Sri Lanka you can go to a supermarket and buy various special pieces for example:  breast, Maryland etc.

The servant was new, and did not know my grandmother's ways and had cut the chicken for the curry that day into 'wrong' pieces. One would ask,  'how could you cut the chicken the wrong way'.  Well apparently there is a 'right' way. And I have never forgotten it.

The way my grandmother cut the chicken was: the  breast is cut down the middle and then each half cut into two pieces. The back is cut into 4 pieces, each thigh cut into two at the joints, and wings cut into two at the joints. The back pieces and the wings are not counted as portions and she used to say a whole chicken only had 8 pieces. So, you can imagine how many chickens were used for a family dinner !  It is cut this way so that the spices can readily penetrate the meat. The neck and also the giblets were included in the curry to give extra flavour.

I very rarely cook a whole chicken for a curry now, preferring to use the breast, or if my daughter was coming for a meal I would cook drumsticks because they are her favourite. But if I do cook a whole chicken, I still calculate that each chicken has only got eight pieces.... Some habits are hard to let go.