This is a Depression-era recipe for Sunday dinner from my mother's mother, who usually had two or three jobs at any given time and never had either the time or the money to learn anything more than short-order cooking until she qualified for the Old Age Pension at age 65.

Four-legged chicken

Buy a small roasting chicken or a large fryer and a few chicken legs. Pull out and put aside the deposits of fat from the vent of the whole chicken. Cut up the whole chicken into serving pieces. Dredge the pieces and the extra legs in flour; shake off the excess. Grind black pepper over the lot.

Set the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Take an onion, some garlic and three or four rashers of bacon. Chop the onion quite small, mince the garlic and cut the bacon into quarter-inch lardons. Fry the bacon with the reserved chicken fat in a large skillet until the pan is well greased; then brown the chicken pieces. Keep the heat down and don't let the onion and garlic scorch.

Put the browned chicken pieces in a flat roasting pan; scrape out the skillet and scatter the scrapings over the pieces. Add peeled potatoes to the pan, sprinkle the whole thing lightly with salt, and bake in the oven until the potatoes are done.