I think all of us, my siblings, were teethed on chicken drumsticks as babies – no mind for health and safety or choking hazards back then! Baby is teething, and highly irritable, thrust a chicken bone at the little tinker to gnaw on!
I wouldn’t recommend bones for teething, but you get the gist that we Indians grow up eating meat on the bone; this would be a whole chicken that the butcher would cut into pieces. We would also have ‘tharri’ or soup made from an older chicken (what mum calls a ‘boiling chicken’, that is older and takes longer to cook) this is essentially a spicy chicken soup that also includes potatoes.
As my own family will not tolerate the ‘hadi’ or bone, I always use chicken thighs – breast is simply too dry and not as flavoursome a cut as thigh – so I use boneless and skinless thigh fillets.