Ingredients
Stick cloves into the whole onion and toast the half onion on the griddle until it turns a nice caramel colour: this will give the broth an amber hue. Peel the other vegetables. Wash the aromatic herbs and tie them together with culinary string. Place all the ingredients in four litres of cold water; add the remaining spices, a teaspoon of coarse salt and, finally, the whole hen.
Bring to the boil, regularly skimming off the foam that forms on the top of the broth, and cook for two and a half hours, or even three if the bird is not particularly young. Just before taking it off the heat, taste and add salt to taste. Leave to cool to room temperature, then filter the broth. This will also remove some of the grease.
A Slow Food Presidium protects two traditional breeds of poultry that have risked extinction, the Piedmontese blond hen and the Saluzzo white hen. The latter, characterised by white plumage, including the tail, is bred - exclusively outdoors - in the Saluzzo area and in some municipalities in the province of Turin (Cavour, Villafranca Piemonte and Garzigliana). It is excellent cooked "cacciatora-style" but especially when boiled, served with its broth, in aspic or in salad.