A Chicken Book

On one of his visits to the Bahamas, Christopher Columbus tasted iguana. In his log he wrote “the meat is white and tastes like chicken.”  On his second voyage, in fact, Columbus brought along a small flock of egg laying hens. This familiar creature had a long history with humans, going back 8000 to 10,000 years. 

Emelyn Rude’s book, titled Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird, is an exploration of the New World history of this domestic fowl. The author’s focus is on the ups and downs of chicken popularity in America after Columbus and many others brought the chicken over here. 

It’s fun to read. I enjoyed the many historic recipes that Rude included to illustrate a variety of attitudes towards chicken. Like Columbus’s chickens, most of the early birds worked as egg producers, and a chicken dinner was unusual, especially because red meat was generally preferred to white meat. 

The development of the beef and pork industries in the late 19th and early 20th century meant the creation of a network of transportation, feed lots, and slaughtering facilities to deliver safe-to-eat red meat to urban consumers. Getting chickens on the tables of Americans took more time and different infrastructure. Tastes Like Chicken documents the development of chicken farms in California, the DelMarVa Peninsula (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia) and in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries. The invention of huge-scale chicken houses, battery farms, and slaughter houses was critical to the mass produced birds that we now consume. 

The mass production of chickens is attributed to Cecile Steele in the DelMarVa Penninsula in the 1920s.
When she received 500 baby chicks instead of the 50 she had ordered, she figured out how to raise them.
Her profitable larger-scale chicken farm was the start of the chicken industry as it operates today.

Another key development of the 1950s and after was the creation of chicken breeds that produced plenty of tender meat faster and more efficiently. I was interested in the recurring challenges of chicken diseases and the use of antibiotics: controversial issues throughout the years. The book also describes the logistics of chicken transport from farm to city tables, and issues such as monopolies and corruption in government oversight.

I enjoyed learning how more and more chicken recipes were invented — from McNuggets to General Tso’s chicken. For each era of chicken consumption, the author includes contemporary recipes from cookbooks and newspaper articles, which illustrate how the bird would have been eaten by people of differing social and economic levels. For example, chicken salad was a dish served at upscale restaurants and hotels in the late 19th century — its preparation was quite elaborate.

My favorite part of the book was the description of how the chicken industry convinced American consumers to barbecue chickens in the 1950s. Backyard barbecue pits and grills were coming into fashion in the post-war years when domestic life was rebounding and being redefined. Huge quantities of chicken for the troops overseas had sustained chicken producers, but no longer were needed. All forms of rationing and self-denial were over — so everyone wanted beef! What did the chicken industry do? Promote “Chick-N-Que.”

Mid-20th Century promotion of a chicken barbecue using Wesson Oil, Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce,
Tabasco Sauce, Reynold’s Wrap, Coke, and broiler chickens from the National Broiler Council.

Have you heard people complain that industrially raised chickens don’t have any taste? That the old-fashioned farmers’ chickens were more delicious? Well, that seems to be wrong when subjected to actual taste tests. Chicken never did have that strong a taste which is why so many meats “taste like chicken.”

Review © 2024 mae sander