In praise of the bachelor’s handbag

It’s often the day The Boss heads into town for a spot of morning shopping, mainly for food — although there’s usually some reason to drop into Hunter’s or Bunnings, and he’ll invite me to go with him.

Either is okay for me: Hunter’s is where he buys the best dog biscuits, and they run a handy line in dog beds as well. At Bunnings, there’s always a chance he’ll pick up a sausage on the way out and give a morsel to me.

But the main event happens at Woolworths opposite the showgrounds, where he can’t seem to go past the food warmer with all the roast chickens sitting in it.

The unmistakable aroma of freshly cooked chook comes wafting past his nostrils while he’s bagging up some apples or pears.

He has already been egged on by yours truly, of course — I start whimpering as soon as he pulls into the car park to make sure he’s focused on my requirements. And he often comes good.

Eventually he emerges with the bachelor’s handbag — so named by the Macquarie Dictionary last year when the term won the readers’ choice award for word of the year.

This finally resolved a tense tussle between “tradies’ handbag” and “bachelor’s briefcase” that had been apparently simmering — without my knowledge, I have to say — for a year or two. Maybe Macquarie just combined the two to get the argument settled and out of the way.

Macquarie defined the bachelor’s handbag as a “noun, colloquial (humorous); a takeaway roast chicken”.

The dictionary people explained its origin as coming from “the fact that such a chicken requires no further preparation before consumption, so is seen as an easy meal favoured by a single person, and is often packaged in a small plastic bag with a handle, resembling a handbag”.

Now, all the supermarkets have ready-to-eat roast chickens these days and The Boss occasionally picks one up from Charcoal Chicken if he’s driving that way.

But I insist on Woolworths if possible, because sometimes they’ll have the tandoori-flavoured one, a particular favourite of mine, or now and then a Lilydale free-range one. The tandoori one costs $2 more, but I tell The Boss it’s worth it.

Typically he will run it under my nose when he gets back into the car just to distress me and I have to wait until he’s home and unpacked to get a look at it.

In short, he takes the brown bits, the Missus takes the white bits and we dogs have to wait for scraps of skin, burnt or otherwise, or the greasy, lumpy bits that they don’t want.

But it’s one of those treats where the taste is right up there with the smell; unlike, for instance, fish and chips wrapped in paper, where the smell is great but the chips and the fish batter end up soggy because the steam can’t escape.

It wasn’t always thus, The Boss tells me. When he was a nipper, a roast chicken was a special treat, happening maybe once a month for Sunday lunch — lunch was then known as “dinnertime”. But he had to accompany his dad and live chook to the woodheap and witness the beheading of the chicken, followed by gutting and plucking on newspaper, spread out on the laundry floor.

He says it was a smelly and lengthy process — and one he’s pleased he doesn’t need to go through anymore. I think I would have quite enjoyed it myself — clearly I was born too late. Woof!