Chicken: Not Just for Sunday Anymore

Somebody is paying attention to the TV commercial about the pig lobbying folks to eat the "other white meat." Chicken is all over the place. No wonder today’s food world is hard for one who does not eat anything starting out with wings and feathers on it.  It’s hard to go out to dinner as a mostly vegetarian when most restaurants feature more chicken entrees than anything else. But, being vegetarian is a little different than the younger relative who scoffs at chicken saying it is so low class that he won’t eat it. Little could one less than a certain age understand what it took to serve chicken before 1950. Those who had the luxury of buying from a butcher shop had it a little easier than the average rural woman though. When Sunday company was served chicken, guests left the table smacking their lips, knowing they were royally treated. Before the days of TV and being ready for some football, Sunday meant two things – church and Sunday dinner.

For women who didn’t have access to a butcher shop, or didn’t want to spend that kind of money, the chicken had to be killed. That meant on Saturday the woman of the house found a suitable hen and chopped off its head. Using a stick with a looped wire, she caught the bird by the neck. Grabbing the it by the legs and carrying it to the spillway where the deed was done took a few minutes. Ever hear about "running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” That’s just what happened as the headless chicken was jumping and blood was flying. It took a few seconds before the chicken dropped.  Blood and unnecessary innards went down the spillway to be taken care of by rodents, ants and flies, all of which had their own feast.

Then the chickens were scalded so the feathers could be pulled off. But what an awful smell!  After all those outer feathers were off, the woman held the chicken by the legs and stood near an open flame, such as  an open furnace door during the winter. Remaining pin feathers were singed so that they could be pulled out.  If there was no open flame, dousing the chicken with a bit of alcohol and touching a match to It also worked on the pin feathers. If scalding smelled awful, singeing those feathers was worse than awful. When the chicken feathers were picked clean, a sharp knife did the rest of the job. The chicken was split so the cavity could be further cleaned.  Gizzards, usually the liver, and the remaining neck were saved to be boiled for soup stock and put into the deep soup well found in the back left burner of most modern electric ranges of the time. It took several hours to butcher and clean the chicken but not nearly so long to bake or fry it. Gobbling up that bird took only a matter of minutes.

Chickens were raised from hatching fertilized eggs that were mail ordered. By November 30, 1904, when Rural Free Delivery was in effect all over Kewaunee County, getting the eggs was easy. Mail carriers delivered cartons of fertilized eggs or anything else that was ordered. Others didn’t wait for mail but got got their chicks from Rubens’ hatchery in Rosiere or from Weidner’s at Hillside. Before those companies, in the post World War l era, Kewaunee’s Evergreen Poultry Farm was advertising 11 kinds of chicks while E.J. LaPlant’s Green Bay hatchery was another popular company selling chicks at prices that are surprising in 2015.

Chicks were expensive for the time. LaPlants sold the finest Rhode Island Reds for 16 cents each. There were Barred Plymouth Rocks, Anconas, and Brown and White Leghorns. Hatching eggs went for about $5.00 per hundred. Those who intended to hatch the eggs at home needed brooders that in the 1920s sold for anywhere from 10 dollars to as much as 22. Chicken mash feeders were other necessary pieces of equipment and the chicken mash itself was expensive. As early as 1909 butcher Peter Kashik made the Record when he installed a grinder for use in pulverizing bones for use as chicken feed. He didn’t make much money but those bones were used rather than discarded.

Sometimes one did not need that pricey equipment. All it took was a willing mother and a box behind the dining room stove. Junior’s friend’s step-brother had a hatchery on Madison Avenue in Sturgeon Bay near the Michigan St. Bridge, about 4 doors north of the Greystone Castle.  The 10 year old friends often hung around the hatchery, running errands or getting cigarettes for the adults. They watched what was going on as  batches of eggs were put into hatchery trays in big drawers. When the drawers were opened, most of the chicks had hatched and those hatchlings were put in a warm incuabator area. Eggs that didn’t hatch were dumped in a metal drum out back. As the boys played, they saw the dumped chicks poking through the shells and hatching in the garbage. Junior began taking eggs home and ended up with chickens, most of which were hens. He and his mother put the eggs in boxes and cans behind the stove in the dining room, and that’s where the chicks hatched. Junior raised chickens that his family ate while having a supply of fresh eggs.

Hatcheries were aware of the numbers of discarded eggs that would surely hatch, however it was expedient to have entire shipments on the same schedule. The thing about chickens was that hens were egg layers that put food on the table in a variety of ways. Roosters generally had stringy meat and weren’t as tasty. Capons are castrated roosters and another story. A farmer needed hens, not roosters, and it is nearly impossible to differentiate between male and female chicks until they are a month or so old, a time when they grow distinctive feathers and develop sex-related characteristics such as a rooster’s comb. Before that, it is hard to tell what they are, but nevertheless, they need to be housed and fed. That can get expensive.

Things changed with an earth-shaking announcement made at the World Poultry Congress in Ottawa in 1927; Japanese scientists realized that just inside a chick’s rear end was tissue that, when properly read, divulged the sex of a chicken. It was this discovery that lowered the price of eggs world-wide and propelled professional chicken sexers to among the most valuable agricultural workers. The finest in the field came from a 2-year program at Japan’s  Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School where standards were so high that only 5-10% of the students received accreditation.  In demand all over the world, graduates of the time could earn an unheard of $500 a day.

Wikipedia says about 50 billion chickens are raised for food – meat and eggs - in the U.S. today, more than any other non-aquatic animal. Some are raised on questionable factory farms where groups say they are abused and subject to cruelty. Other chickens are free-range and many are certified as organic.  Things have changed in the last 60 years. Those past 80 say chicken no longer tastes like the chicken they remember. However, they can stop at Denny’s, the Pig or Stodola’s and buy a clean, ready to fry, bake or grill chicken. And if time is of the essence, picking up a ready cooked, hot, ready-to-eat chicken doesn’t cost much more. Nobody has to run around like a chicken with its head cut off to serve chicken. All the work has been done and it is sure to be called “tasty.” Except by the vegetarians and those who feel it is too low classed to eat.

Note: This blogger does not enjoy being around barnyard fowl of any kind, but does enjoy seeing and learning about the most unusual chickens in a variety of places. Headless chickens running about remains implanted in memories. Joshua Foer's fascinating Moonwalking with Einstein contained the information about the chicken sexing, which put much into perspective and led to the post.

Sources: Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein, Thorndike Press, 2011; Evergreen Poultry ad from Algoma Record Herald; Monarch range ad from Door County Advocate; information on the chicken industry today and pictures of the Rhode Island Red and the Leghorn are from Wikipedia.