Meat Chickens

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Best birds as a start for Duel Purpose(Meat, & Eggs), would be Buff Orpingtons, Barred Rocks, Australorps, & RIRs. These generally have a good meat to fat ratio.

Brahmas are good too, but take longer to fill out, good for soup, stews, or slow roasted until tender, or off the bone.

Malays are very meaty, but lean. More like wild turkey. I haven't eaten any yet, but may do so soon. These are heavy weights, & can weigh as much as 15lbs at full maturity.

Best meat cross I've done was Easter Egger X Brahma.
 
I have wrestled with this. Dual purpose birds are very expensive per pound of meat to produce and take a long time to mature. As long as your are taking that into consideration then there are options. I share the tendency to be highly principled but after growing out 50+ heritage birds over the years, as well as hundreds of Cornish cross, I have to admit that the Cornish cross is vastly better in terms of time to harvest, cost per pound and overall value. The cost benefit trade off of having to purchase Cornish cross every time vs breeding out all your own heritage meat birds makes it well worth it. It’s so so much more expensive per lb to produce meat via heritage breed vs CX it’s no contest, imho. If you don’t mind waiting 6 months to harvest and pay orders of magnitude more per lb, then go for it, but 6-8 weeks to harvest and the low cost per lb makes the required reliance on someone else to do the breeding, well worth it. If things really take a turn for the worse and it looks like mail ordering the chicks won’t be reliable, as in some sort of Armageddon, then perhaps I’ll switch to a heritage/dual purpose breed.
 
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