I’ve noticed recipes that call for chicken rarely offer instructions on how one obtains boneless chicken meat to use as an ingredient. If the truth were known, I suspect that many cooks, particularly those who didn’t have a mother who learned to cook during the Depression, buy boneless chicken breasts for such purposes.

This is a timely subject here in the dead of winter, when homemade chicken soup ranks as the ultimate comfort food and cure for what ails you. But there is a much more economical way to acquire chicken meat than to buy expensive cuts of chicken.

When whole chickens are on sale, they are generally priced at about 79 cents a pound. In other words, for the price of one boneless chicken breast, you can buy a whole chicken. Not only will you have the extra meat, but if you follow my instructions, you’ll also have several cups of chicken stock to use as a soup or gravy base. My mother taught me this trick when I was in college and first trying to cook on a budget.

How to prepare

It’s helpful if you have a crock pot or other slow cooker, although you can do this in a soup pot on top of the stove, too.

Take a thawed, 4-to-5-pound whole chicken, remove the packet of organs and rinse the chicken thoroughly. Liberally salt and pepper the inside of the bird. Fill the cavity with a bay leaf and a small onion cut into eighths. If you have celery in the crisper drawer, substitute a celery stalk for half the onion.

Place the chicken in the slow cooker or soup pot, breast side up, and add enough water so the breast is just sticking out of the water. Cover and simmer in the slow cooker on medium, or at the lowest setting on the stove, until the chicken is done, about four hours. The chicken will be done when a leg comes loose with a gentle tug.

You’ll need to let the chicken cool enough so that you can handle it to remove the meat from the bones. Remove the chicken to a large bowl and place it in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes.

Place the broth in a separate bowl, cover it and refrigerate it as well. If you want to strain the broth first, to remove pieces of onion, go ahead. Once the broth has chilled, you can easily skim the fat from the surface.

Watch for bones

When you begin to handle the chicken, you’ll find it is quite fragile and comes apart easily. That’s because the cartilage disintegrated or became detached during cooking. You’ll want to remove the meat from the carcass as efficiently as possible, making sure to get all the tiny bones. The easiest way to do this is by hand, with your sleeves rolled up.

Start with the legs and wings, removing small bits of meat at a time and setting the bones aside. Next, do the breast and thighs, and then the back, where the bits of meat are smallest, but where some people believe the meat is the most flavorful, particularly for soups.

As you work, continually run your fingers through the meat to make sure you aren’t missing any bones.

When you’re done, you’ll have a couple of pounds of chicken meat and a nice quantity of flavorful broth. The broth may be strong enough that you’ll want to dilute it for soup. Either way, all you have to do to make soup now is to place broth and meat in a pan and add the vegetables, pasta and flavoring. You may still have meat left over to use for something else later.