Emelyn Rude

I really enjoyed this book, but as always, I wonder why I even eat chicken when I get to the chapters on how they are raised. It brought up visions of Food, Inc.

Lots of good stuff in here (if you're inclined to consider odd facts about animals good stuff). There is so much trivia in this book. I learned why chicken wasn't a popular meat until recently (Hey! It's not real food for real men!) and I learned about the modern development of the chicken industry. I actually had a hard time putting this down but ended up not being able to do a marathon read because of other (sigh) obligations.

The author, Evelyn Rude, has a great sense to humor, also. This is not a dry read by any means.… (more)

I found this book very interesting. It traces the culinary history of chicken and eggs, and one of the things I liked was that it included original recipes for the dishes discussed (a few had to be translated).

Our appetite for chickens and their eggs is so voracious that the worldwide population of chickens is over 50 billion, making Gallus gallus domesticus one of the most abundant avian species in the world. Almost everyone seems to enjoy it in some form – Hungarians braise it to make paprikash, the Senegalese stew it with peanuts and serve it over rice, Mexicans coat it with mole verde, the Japanese dine finely on mizutaki (and some enjoy chicken sashimi), and Java, Vienna, and the American South are all famous for their fried chicken, although of course the ingredients and techniques vary. Indeed, “there’s no other ingredient quite like it – a food so universal that when you say, “tastes like chicken,” almost everyone on the planet will have some idea of what you are talking about.” (page 12).

The analogy is not new; upon tasting iguana for the first time, Columbus explained that “the meat is white and tastes like chicken.” However, he might have had something somewhat different in mind, because the taste of a chicken varies according to its genetics, diet, and general lifestyle. Chickens are naturally omnivores and eat insects as well as grain, but most of today’s chickens do not eat the same way. A typical broiler chicken today has also been specifically bred to produce as much meat as possible, to the point of being so heavy it spends most of its life immobile.

The US is the world’s largest consumer of chicken, even though Americans are better known throughout the world for their love of beef. Americans eat an average of over 90 pounds of chicken per person per year (about 23 birds); for comparison, the average consumption of beef per person per year is 50 pounds. Americans consume almost six million pounds of chicken every hour, which works out to 8.6 billion chickens per year. That’s almost a third of total annual global consumption. So if you’re a typical American, “you eat chicken to the point of boredom, go search for something else to eat, and then end up eating more chicken.” (page 15). In fact, the first known American recipe for chicken appears in a 1798 cookbook, which is also considered the first American cookbook.

Chickens were domesticated between eight and ten thousand years ago. With such a long history, it’s no surprise that the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” was debated in ancient Greece. Later, the ancient Romans invented the omelet and came up with the idea of stuffing chickens before roasting them. They even embarked on a chicken breeding program to try to get more and better meat. They also believed in the curative powers of chicken soup – Pliny the Elder even thought it could cure dysentery. In fact, the use of chicken soup as a panacea has an extremely long history; the ancient Persians and most of the medieval Arab world also prescribed chicken soup as a cure-all. And in the twelfth century, the Jewish physician Maimonides recommended that people suffering from everything from asthma to leprosy should sip what has now been nicknamed “Jewish penicillin.” The book includes a medieval recipe from the 1390’s for chicken soup, which also contained eggs, ginger, sugar, saffron, and salt, with wine added immediately before serving.

Southern fried chicken is in a class by itself. There are two schools of preparing Southern fried chicken – Virginia Fried Chicken and Maryland Fried Chicken. The earliest written example of Southern fried chicken came from a cookbook written by Mary Randolph in 1824, and as a Virginian herself it should come as no surprise that she subscribed to the Virginia school of thought on the subject. The Virginia method called for deep-frying the bird; the Maryland method called for pan-frying it, then covering the skillet with a lid so that the meat would be steamed as well as crisped. If the ubiquity of KFC is any indication, it looks like the Virginia method has won by a landslide. The Virginia method has its origins in the culinary traditions of Scotland, where the preferred technique was to batter the meat and then deep-fry it in pork fat. However, the story does not stop there, because the Africans brought over as slaves also had their own versions of fried chicken, often coated in chilies or smothered in curry sauces, and typically fried in palm oil. What is thought of now as Southern fried chicken is a fusion of African and Scottish flavors and techniques.

In a complete inversion of today’s prices, chicken was more expensive than veal during the Gilded Age; in 1865 New York City, chicken cost $3.78 per pound in today’s dollars. That made it so expensive that serving chicken salad was a status symbol among the wealthy, especially when paired with champagne. Indeed, “nothing has connoted affluence quite like the combination of birds and bubbly. Its union of flavors is so divine it has even been immortalized in poetry.” (page 79). Part of the reason chicken was so expensive was because up until the 1950’s chicken was only sold whole, often with the head and legs still attached and with minimal processing, so that a buying pound of chicken in the market typically translated into a quarter of a pound of edible meat and three-quarters of a pound of chicken bones, blood, and innards. Meanwhile, buying a pound of sirloin steak meant buying roughly a pound of edible meat, which meant that pound for pound chicken was four times as expensive as steak. Very few chickens were available in large cities, and without a modern infrastructure it was difficult to import more from the countryside – and the countryside didn’t have that many to export either, as it was not yet cost-effective to raise large numbers of them and then ship them into cities.

This pricing trend continued well into the 1930’s, and contributed to what is now known as “City Chicken.” Because both chicken (at least the cuts most popular among Americans) and veal have very little inherent flavor, it is easy to substitute one for the other and no one be the wiser. Eventually, this trend resulted in butchers skewering cubes of veal and pork and selling it to their customers as “mock chicken.” Most customers would take the skewers home, bread them, brown and simmer them, and then eat them as though they were eating a drumstick. Chicken prices remained high in cities well into the 1930’s and “mock chicken” morphed into “city chicken,” which is still labeled and sold as such in some areas of the Midwest.

Eggs have also been popular throughout the world for most of history. People learned long ago that the best way to get a hen to keep laying is to immediately remove the eggs she has already laid. Some of the eggs are eaten, but if you want to build a flock some of them must be set aside to hatch in whatever artificial incubators are readily available. This practice goes back millennia; 3,000 years ago the ancient Egyptians had large egg ovens, and a well-trained individual could hatch 40,000 to 80,000 eggs at a time by monitoring the fire’s temperature and turning the eggs twice a day. Similar structures dating to 500 BC have also been discovered in China. Medieval Europe had considerably less success with temperature control, and it was not until 1881 that the first industrially-produced and commercially viable artificial incubator was invented. The original machine was made out of California redwood and, true to the fashions of time, had ornately carved legs. As part of his advertising campaign, he began taking the incubator to agricultural fairs throughout the country and used it to hatch ostriches and alligators at exhibitions. The campaign worked and eggs began being mass-produced. Nineteenth-century photography owes a great deal to mass-produced eggs because early photographers relied on albumen paper, coated in an emulsion of egg whites and salt, to make their prints. Companies that produced this paper could easily go through 60,000 eggs a day.

One popular Renaissance method for cooking eggs was roasting them before a hot fire or buried in coals; if it is done correctly the inside of the egg will acquire a caramel color and a new depth of flavor. But if the egg stayed by the fire too long, it could explode or only one half would be successfully cooked. Shakespeare’s original audiences must have known this, because an insult in one of his plays was “Truly, thou art damn’d, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.” Less skilled chefs could spit the eggs, but at least one cookbook author of the time concluded that eggs on a spit were “a stupid concoction.” Roasting, of course, is not the only way to cook eggs, and various techniques for egg cookery seem to have grown up wherever the chicken itself went, from North Africa to Indonesia.

And now for some science – I love books with science in them, expected or not. There are over 100 recognized breeds of chicken today, and at least a quarter of them were developed during the mid-nineteenth century, when chickens became increasingly popular and “Hen Fever” raged. There were chicken shows that were similar to dog shows today, and a great deal of effort went into developing breeding standards. These efforts spurred one of the earliest geneticists, the British scientist William Bateson. What Mendel did with peas, Bateson did with chickens, and demonstrated that the same principles of inheritance applied for both plants and animals.

As Bateson’s studies showed, “Hen Fever” and the development of new breeds was not restricted to the United States. Mottled and streamlined Russian Orloffs, fluffy Japanese silkies, Golden Polish, and the pure black Indonesian Ayam Cemani all came into their own during this time, as did the English Orpingtons and Dorkings. The book contains drawings of some of these breeds. Many of them are beautiful, but because they neither lay prodigious numbers of eggs nor rapidly grow, their populations are relatively small, and most of them are considered “heritage breeds” suitable for historic farms and perhaps specialty gourmet stores. They also serve as reservoirs of genetic diversity, which may be needed sooner than we think.

Chickens play an important part in the transmission of influenza viruses. Wild migratory birds are the primary source of all influenza viruses in chickens, and subsequently humans. And wherever chickens mix with wild migratory birds, they can easily pick up the newest strains of avian influenza. Meanwhile, the extensive international trade in domestic chickens means that the viruses can rapidly spread to new populations. The lack of genetic diversity (almost all chickens raised for the meat market are of a single breed) makes epidemics even more likely; on the other hand, the genetic diversity of wild birds and small backyard flocks can often keep the viruses from spreading. The problem is compounded by factory farming conditions; modern broiler houses are not only perfectly designed to grow chickens but also to incubate avian influenza, and sometimes a single lapse in biosecurity is all it takes to wipe out a flock of thousands. Avian influenza viruses can also readily mutate into strains that infect humans, such as the H5N1 virus that killed multiple people in Hong Kong. But chickens also play an important part in preventing the spread of influenza among humans, because most influenza viruses used in the flu vaccine are incubated in eggs.

Recommended for anyone who enjoys omelets, Buffalo wings, chicken nuggets, or roasted chicken for Sunday dinner, as well as fans of culinary history.… (more)

I found this book very interesting. It traces the culinary history of chicken and eggs, and one of the things I liked was that it included original recipes for the dishes discussed (a few had to be translated).

Our appetite for chickens and their eggs is so voracious that the worldwide population of chickens is over 50 billion, making Gallus gallus domesticus one of the most abundant avian species in the world. Almost everyone seems to enjoy it in some form – Hungarians braise it to make paprikash, the Senegalese stew it with peanuts and serve it over rice, Mexicans coat it with mole verde, the Japanese dine finely on mizutaki (and some enjoy chicken sashimi), and Java, Vienna, and the American South are all famous for their fried chicken, although of course the ingredients and techniques vary. Indeed, “there’s no other ingredient quite like it – a food so universal that when you say, “tastes like chicken,” almost everyone on the planet will have some idea of what you are talking about.” (page 12).

The analogy is not new; upon tasting iguana for the first time, Columbus explained that “the meat is white and tastes like chicken.” However, he might have had something somewhat different in mind, because the taste of a chicken varies according to its genetics, diet, and general lifestyle. Chickens are naturally omnivores and eat insects as well as grain, but most of today’s chickens do not eat the same way. A typical broiler chicken today has also been specifically bred to produce as much meat as possible, to the point of being so heavy it spends most of its life immobile.

The US is the world’s largest consumer of chicken, even though Americans are better known throughout the world for their love of beef. Americans eat an average of over 90 pounds of chicken per person per year (about 23 birds); for comparison, the average consumption of beef per person per year is 50 pounds. Americans consume almost six million pounds of chicken every hour, which works out to 8.6 billion chickens per year. That’s almost a third of total annual global consumption. So if you’re a typical American, “you eat chicken to the point of boredom, go search for something else to eat, and then end up eating more chicken.” (page 15). In fact, the first known American recipe for chicken appears in a 1798 cookbook, which is also considered the first American cookbook.

Chickens were domesticated between eight and ten thousand years ago. With such a long history, it’s no surprise that the question “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” was debated in ancient Greece. Later, the ancient Romans invented the omelet and came up with the idea of stuffing chickens before roasting them. They even embarked on a chicken breeding program to try to get more and better meat. They also believed in the curative powers of chicken soup – Pliny the Elder even thought it could cure dysentery. In fact, the use of chicken soup as a panacea has an extremely long history; the ancient Persians and most of the medieval Arab world also prescribed chicken soup as a cure-all. And in the twelfth century, the Jewish physician Maimonides recommended that people suffering from everything from asthma to leprosy should sip what has now been nicknamed “Jewish penicillin.” The book includes a medieval recipe from the 1390’s for chicken soup, which also contained eggs, ginger, sugar, saffron, and salt, with wine added immediately before serving.

Southern fried chicken is in a class by itself. There are two schools of preparing Southern fried chicken – Virginia Fried Chicken and Maryland Fried Chicken. The earliest written example of Southern fried chicken came from a cookbook written by Mary Randolph in 1824, and as a Virginian herself it should come as no surprise that she subscribed to the Virginia school of thought on the subject. The Virginia method called for deep-frying the bird; the Maryland method called for pan-frying it, then covering the skillet with a lid so that the meat would be steamed as well as crisped. If the ubiquity of KFC is any indication, it looks like the Virginia method has won by a landslide. The Virginia method has its origins in the culinary traditions of Scotland, where the preferred technique was to batter the meat and then deep-fry it in pork fat. However, the story does not stop there, because the Africans brought over as slaves also had their own versions of fried chicken, often coated in chilies or smothered in curry sauces, and typically fried in palm oil. What is thought of now as Southern fried chicken is a fusion of African and Scottish flavors and techniques.

In a complete inversion of today’s prices, chicken was more expensive than veal during the Gilded Age; in 1865 New York City, chicken cost $3.78 per pound in today’s dollars. That made it so expensive that serving chicken salad was a status symbol among the wealthy, especially when paired with champagne. Indeed, “nothing has connoted affluence quite like the combination of birds and bubbly. Its union of flavors is so divine it has even been immortalized in poetry.” (page 79). Part of the reason chicken was so expensive was because up until the 1950’s chicken was only sold whole, often with the head and legs still attached and with minimal processing, so that a buying pound of chicken in the market typically translated into a quarter of a pound of edible meat and three-quarters of a pound of chicken bones, blood, and innards. Meanwhile, buying a pound of sirloin steak meant buying roughly a pound of edible meat, which meant that pound for pound chicken was four times as expensive as steak. Very few chickens were available in large cities, and without a modern infrastructure it was difficult to import more from the countryside – and the countryside didn’t have that many to export either, as it was not yet cost-effective to raise large numbers of them and then ship them into cities.

This pricing trend continued well into the 1930’s, and contributed to what is now known as “City Chicken.” Because both chicken (at least the cuts most popular among Americans) and veal have very little inherent flavor, it is easy to substitute one for the other and no one be the wiser. Eventually, this trend resulted in butchers skewering cubes of veal and pork and selling it to their customers as “mock chicken.” Most customers would take the skewers home, bread them, brown and simmer them, and then eat them as though they were eating a drumstick. Chicken prices remained high in cities well into the 1930’s and “mock chicken” morphed into “city chicken,” which is still labeled and sold as such in some areas of the Midwest.

Eggs have also been popular throughout the world for most of history. People learned long ago that the best way to get a hen to keep laying is to immediately remove the eggs she has already laid. Some of the eggs are eaten, but if you want to build a flock some of them must be set aside to hatch in whatever artificial incubators are readily available. This practice goes back millennia; 3,000 years ago the ancient Egyptians had large egg ovens, and a well-trained individual could hatch 40,000 to 80,000 eggs at a time by monitoring the fire’s temperature and turning the eggs twice a day. Similar structures dating to 500 BC have also been discovered in China. Medieval Europe had considerably less success with temperature control, and it was not until 1881 that the first industrially-produced and commercially viable artificial incubator was invented. The original machine was made out of California redwood and, true to the fashions of time, had ornately carved legs. As part of his advertising campaign, he began taking the incubator to agricultural fairs throughout the country and used it to hatch ostriches and alligators at exhibitions. The campaign worked and eggs began being mass-produced. Nineteenth-century photography owes a great deal to mass-produced eggs because early photographers relied on albumen paper, coated in an emulsion of egg whites and salt, to make their prints. Companies that produced this paper could easily go through 60,000 eggs a day.

One popular Renaissance method for cooking eggs was roasting them before a hot fire or buried in coals; if it is done correctly the inside of the egg will acquire a caramel color and a new depth of flavor. But if the egg stayed by the fire too long, it could explode or only one half would be successfully cooked. Shakespeare’s original audiences must have known this, because an insult in one of his plays was “Truly, thou art damn’d, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.” Less skilled chefs could spit the eggs, but at least one cookbook author of the time concluded that eggs on a spit were “a stupid concoction.” Roasting, of course, is not the only way to cook eggs, and various techniques for egg cookery seem to have grown up wherever the chicken itself went, from North Africa to Indonesia.

And now for some science – I love books with science in them, expected or not. There are over 100 recognized breeds of chicken today, and at least a quarter of them were developed during the mid-nineteenth century, when chickens became increasingly popular and “Hen Fever” raged. There were chicken shows that were similar to dog shows today, and a great deal of effort went into developing breeding standards. These efforts spurred one of the earliest geneticists, the British scientist William Bateson. What Mendel did with peas, Bateson did with chickens, and demonstrated that the same principles of inheritance applied for both plants and animals.

As Bateson’s studies showed, “Hen Fever” and the development of new breeds was not restricted to the United States. Mottled and streamlined Russian Orloffs, fluffy Japanese silkies, Golden Polish, and the pure black Indonesian Ayam Cemani all came into their own during this time, as did the English Orpingtons and Dorkings. The book contains drawings of some of these breeds. Many of them are beautiful, but because they neither lay prodigious numbers of eggs nor rapidly grow, their populations are relatively small, and most of them are considered “heritage breeds” suitable for historic farms and perhaps specialty gourmet stores. They also serve as reservoirs of genetic diversity, which may be needed sooner than we think.

Chickens play an important part in the transmission of influenza viruses. Wild migratory birds are the primary source of all influenza viruses in chickens, and subsequently humans. And wherever chickens mix with wild migratory birds, they can easily pick up the newest strains of avian influenza. Meanwhile, the extensive international trade in domestic chickens means that the viruses can rapidly spread to new populations. The lack of genetic diversity (almost all chickens raised for the meat market are of a single breed) makes epidemics even more likely; on the other hand, the genetic diversity of wild birds and small backyard flocks can often keep the viruses from spreading. The problem is compounded by factory farming conditions; modern broiler houses are not only perfectly designed to grow chickens but also to incubate avian influenza, and sometimes a single lapse in biosecurity is all it takes to wipe out a flock of thousands. Avian influenza viruses can also readily mutate into strains that infect humans, such as the H5N1 virus that killed multiple people in Hong Kong. But chickens also play an important part in preventing the spread of influenza among humans, because most influenza viruses used in the flu vaccine are incubated in eggs.

Recommended for anyone who enjoys omelets, Buffalo wings, chicken nuggets, or roasted chicken for Sunday dinner, as well as fans of culinary history.… (more)