Yes, Virginia, there is a chicken

From Loretta:

Christine wins a signed copy of Lord of Scoundrels because I thought her question would be fun to look into:
<<Well, I don't know if it is a suggestion or not, but  am always curious about where inspiration comes from.  Does it come from music, or out of the blue?
Also, my sister mentioned that chicken was not eaten until perhaps Victorian times.  Now while I don't remember meals in general being mentioned in many books, but I'm certain I've seen chicken consumed in books - or maybe it was geese (surely chicken was eaten earlier than 100 or so years ago).  Don't know that that would make a good blog though.>>

I don’t know about the other Wenches but my inspiration comes from a desire to maintain a roof over my head and eat regular meals...which leads nicely to food, always an excellent subject for the blog.

Christine, I’d love to know where your sister got this idea.  Chicken has been around and has appeared on dining tables for centuries.

I consulted Reay Tannahill’s Food in History and found the following: (p. 38):  “The great Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro--at their peak between 2300BC and 1500BC....may even have begun on the domestication of the Indian jungle fowl, later to become the world’s ‘chicken.” 

On p. 88 Tannahill refers to an Apician (from an ancient Roman cookbook) recipe that “recommends saucing cold chicken with dill, mint, dates, vinegar, liquamen, oil, mustard, asafoetida and boiled-down grape juice.”  Liquamen, according to the OED, is “the name of a kind of fish sauce used by the ancient Romans.”  However, there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether the Latin of the recipe refers to chickens or guinea fowl.  AgTigress may wish to comment on this.

According to this book (p. 31) braised chicken is referred to in a third century BC poem “The Summons of the Soul.”

But on to Georgian and Regency times (18th & early 19th C).  From The Jane Austen Cookbook by Maggie Black & Dierdre Le Faye [my notes are in color in brackets]: 

“In July 1779 Miss Catherine Hutton dined with the Revd Mr Shuttleworth, the rector of Aston in Derbyshire” and here’s part of her account:  “At three o’clock we sat down to table, which was covered with salmon at top, fennel sauce to it, melted butter, lemon pickle and soy; at the bottom a loin of veal roasted; on one side kidney beans, on the other peas, and in the middle a hot pigeon pie with yolks of eggs in.  [This would be the first course, which might include five to twenty-five dishes].  To the kidney beans and peas succeeded ham and chickens, [second course--another five to twenty-five] and when everything was removed came a currant tart  [an intermediate dessert--one of these might be served after first course, as well]....After dinner we had water to wash [ in finger-bowls], and when the cloth was taken away, [the table cloth was removed and another cloth or the bare table lay beneath], gooseberries, currants and melon, wines and cyder” [for the dessert course].

Food & dining is an inexhaustible subject--not to mention fraught with peril, as is usually the case with historical matters.  Other sources explain the courses differently, for instance.  So I’ll limit myself to a couple of notes.  At this time, people dined à la Française:  The numerous dishes for the course were set on the table all at once.  You’d help yourself from the side dishes nearby.  If you wanted something from another part of the table, you’d have to ask for it or, if there were plenty of servants, you'd send one to fetch it for you.

Miss Hutton’s is one type of meal served to a certain group of people.  We need to keep in mind that what (not to mention what time) people ate depended on their class and how fashionable they were.

Still, lest we assume that the humble chicken was not presented to grander guests, here’s what Prince William of Gloucester saw when he sat down to dinner with the Dean of Canterbury on 25 August 1798:  “Fricando of veal, chickens, curry of rabbits soup, open tart syllabub, macaroni, baskets of pastry, salmon trout, soles, vegetable pudding, muffin pudding, three sweetbreads-larded, peas, potatoes, goose, raised giblet pie, ham, preserve of olives, haunch of venison, raised jelly, buttered lobster, custards.”

According to the 97-item menu reproduced in J.B. Priestley’s The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, a dinner given by the Prince Regent in 1817 included La fricassee de poulets à l’Italienne; Les poulets à la reine, à la Chevry; Les petits poulets à l’Indienne; and Les poulets gras bardés.”

Another note:  While the wealthy had their greenhouses for growing exotic or tender fruits and vegetables, food generally tended to be locally produced and seasonable, as The Jane Austen Cookbook notes (p. 16.):  “Nearly all housewives in the country kept their own poultry yard, which would yield the eggs and meat from turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, guinea-fowl and perhaps some hand-reared pheasants.”

The illustration of a cottager feeding poultry is from W.H. Pyne’s Picturesque Views of Rural Occupations in Early Nineteenth Century England.  The first version of this book was published in 1808.

  So, yes, Virginia, there is a chicken, well before Queen Victoria's time.

These are Rhode Island Reds, which belonged to a friend of mine.  The chickens above are historically accurate poultry from Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, MA.

Ask a question or make a comment and you might win a copy of Lord of Scoundrels.   It's the holiday season, after all.

Comments

[AgTigress]

The domestic fowl was widely kept and consumed in the Roman Empire, and indeed, was probably first introduced to European provinces such as Britannia and Gaul in that period: as you have already pointed out, the wild species is native to the Indian sub-Continent. There is plenty of archaeological evidence for the bones of domestic fowl from Roman sites in Britain, and apart from that, one need only look at representations of the god Mercury, one of whose animal attributes was a cockerel (Am. 'rooster').
Chickens may well have been kept more for their eggs than their meat in the Roman world, since eggs were an extremely important part of the diet. I envisage a situation similar to that which still existed in my own childhood in rural areas: hens were kept mainly for the eggs, and when one of them became old and unproductive, she would be slaughtered to produce a chicken casserole or stew. Boiling chicken is virtually unknown these days. Young cockerels surplus to requirements would be killed for roasting.

[kay]

How did any of those women remain slim? I know there were slim ones, I can think of Caroline Lamb right off the top of my head. They didn't exercise, although they did do a lot of walking, but I am always stunned by the amount of food consumed.

[Christine]

My thanks!! I love it when my sister is proven wrong - if only because she spouts these bits of wisdom like they were etched in stone!

Somehow I *thought* that chicken would have been a much earlier food - certainly they must have been domesticated fairly early on.

[Jane O]

"How did any of those women remain slim?" Easy. They didn't eat everything — only the things nearby and then only a little bit of each. It wasn't as if they had what we would consider a full portion of each of those 25 dishes.
When we visited Washington Irving's house one time, the docent was describing the meals and said that the courses in dinner à la français were called removes because after each one the servants removed not only the dishes but also the tablecloth to uncover a clean tablecloth beneath for the next course. Modern dining fashions (à la russe?) must have ben welcome by the maids in charge of the laundry.

[Gretchen F]

I know that scurvy was a problem in the Navy because of the lack of Vitamin C in the diet. But they didn't have refrigeration on land. So- how did they preserve fruits and vegetables? I know meat could be smoked and salted, and animals could be slaughtered at any time, but only the rich had greenhouses (and how early did they come into use?) so what did the common folk do? How early was canning invented? Since they knew nothing about vitamins and minerals, how common were nutritional deficit diseases? This is a lot of questions, but food is a great topic- and one that I'm interested in, as my weight attests, alas. You don't have to answer all of them- Maybe some can be saved for our learned friend(!!!) Dr. J, on Friday.

[Maya]

"tastes like Indian jungle fowl!" just doesn't have the same ring as "tastes like chicken!"

[NinaP]

Kay asked.. "How did any of those women remain slim?"

Along with Jane O's excellent response, I'll add... just try eating a full meal while trussed up in a corset. Even when lightly laced, there's precious little room for expansion.

I've often considered donning mine as a diet aid.

[Georgie Lee]

Did you see the article on the Restoration cookbook up for auction?
It's an older article but it does mention some interesting dishes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=426774&in_

[Jane O]

Gretchen, before canning there was the root cellar — and you can still preserve root vegeables this way for the winter. So poor people ate turnips and other root vegetables, if they were lucky, and suffered from all sorts of nutritional diseases and lousy teeth. If they weren't lucky, they starved. Wish I could say that doesn't happen in the modern world.

[Jane O]

I forgot porridge and, of course, potatoes.

[Maureen]

Everytime I read about dinners prepared in the past I think about all the work that has to go into preparing it and I am grateful that cooking food for your family is so much easier now.

[Jane]

I saw on the History Channel that the Ancient Romans consumed small rodents called dormice. I'm glad chicken was a choice in ancient times because that's what I would have chosen to eat if I could afford to be picky.

[AgTigress]

A couple of points: the Edible Dormouse (Glis glis) was merely an occasional delicacy in Roman cuisine, not a regular part of the diet. They look more like squirrels than mice or rats, and are quite big (about 8"/20 cm body length), and they were kept in confinement and fattened on a special grain diet. Everyone gets wide-eyed over a 'mouse' being eaten, but really, they are not that different from rabbit or hare.

Fruit: many varieties of apple can be kept in a dry, well-aired area throughout the winter and eaten raw/fresh for months. When I was a girl, we used to harvest the Bramley apples (a sour, excellent cooking apple, in the autumn, and keep some of them in the loft throughout the winter. Too sharp to eat raw when freshly picked, they would be sweeter and fine to eat by about February. Very good with Cheddar cheese.

Preserving of fruit: I know much more about the Roman period than later eras, but many fruits - apples, peaches, apricots, dates, grapes, currants etc. - can be dried very effectively indeed, conserving not only their flavour but also their nutritional value, and can then be eaten either as they are, or rehydrated and cooked. Fruit can also be preserved very well in honey (later sugar) and/or wine.

And do not forget that in the Roman period and also later, in the Middle Ages, there was plenty of trade between countries, so that out-of-season fresh food was not necessarily unavailable to the wealthy. Commodities such as dried dates were certainly being regularly imported into northern European provinces from the Mediterranean and Middle East as early as the 1st century AD. Although some populations in the past did suffer from deficiences, they were no worse that the dietary problems promoted by our more self-indulgent diets, particularly the excessive quantities of sugar now consumed by most of us!

In temperate climates in Europe, many root and leaf vegetables can be grown and harvested throughout the winter: carrots, parsips, turnips, spinach, many varieties of cabbage, Brussels sprouts and so on are all able to grow in the winter and are mnot adversely affected by some frost and snow. I know little about the extreme conditions of some parts of North America, but they were not very populous till the Modern period anyway.

Tinning (canning) food only came in in the late 19th century, and it was a while before it was perfected.

:-)

[LorettaChase]

Thank you, AgTigress. That question was way way outside my area of expertise. In fact, I was amazed when the translation for "pullus" was questioned--because of course my first reaction was, "that has to mean chicken." Then I looked it up in my little Latin dictionary and...found out...um...not necessarily. So archaeological evidence answers the question when language doesn't.___Kay, as Jane O points out, people didn't necessarily eat everything. Or a guest might simply take a small spoonful--to taste--rather than a full serving. As to exercise--in fact, many--though not all--ladies did get exercise, riding or walking. I came across a picture last night of ladies playing tennis, I think--but I didn't bookmark it, as it didn't seem relevant at the time.___Christine, it's not the weirdest assertion I've ever heard regarding some aspect of history. And I have encountered any number of people who make such assertions. If my work's taught me anything, it's to be cautious about pronouncements. And about sources. One book I consulted about that dinner in 1817, for instance, turned out to be riddled with errors. And, as I said, descriptions of a la Francaise style dining did vary. That's why I quoted directly from specific books.___But I am deeply curious about where she got the idea.

[Jill A]

Regarding the Arctic, it's my understanding that the traditional Inuit diet consists primarily of meat - they would eat every edible part of an animal, including its fat. I suppose their bodies have adapted over the centuries to not getting much carbs and vegetables.

[LorettaChase]

Jane O, thank you for amplifying. I could only touch on style of service--and it was very hard to try to stay focused on chicken! Apparently, by the time they got to the dessert course, they might--but not necessarily--be down to bare table. I've done a guest blog on laundry--and yes, a large house made mountains of it--and that's not even counting people's clothes.___Gretchen F, clever me--I left the computer and made a pot of tea for a very cold day. When I returned, AgTigress had answered your question. But not wishing to appear lazy, I'll add a bit from The Jane Austen Cookbook: "The careful housewife had to spend a large part of the summer months in salting, pickling, drying, potting, candying, jamming, cheese-making, brewing, wine-making, and generally storing and preserving in any other feasible way the various kinds of garden and dairy produce available to her."

[Nathalie]

Thanks for all these details... funny how meals can change overtime... now chicken is an everyday food, which was not the case with meat in general before!

[Lily]

Chicken... great post, especially that my family has this important tradition of eating together a copious chicken and rice meal every saturday :)

[LorettaChase]

LOL, Maya. I think I'm going to say "tastes like Indian jungle fowl" from now on.___Nina, maybe it limited your intake but his corset did not do the trick for the Prince Regent, poor guy.__Georgie Lee, it's not even my time period and I looked at that page with lust in my heart. But not with £1000 in my purse.___ Maureen, it's hard for us to fully grasp just how much work it was and how much physical strength and endurance it demanded.___ AgTigress, thank you for addressing Jane's comment. I've eaten rabbit, so my rational self tells me I could probably eat the Edible Dormouse. But I'm not sure. This may be one of those things where I'd need to have grown up in the culture.

[Loretta Chase]

Jane O and Jill A: As I understand it, vegetables were not a prominent feature in the diet of the well-off in the Regency era--and throughout the 19th century--and into the 20th. And it still seems to be an issue--else health authorities would not be urging us to cut back on meat and increase fruits & vegetables. The poor definitely have fewer choices. Today, ironically, a low income may mean a greater risk of obesity.___Nathalie, I think it was Madhur Jaffrey in one of her cookbooks who mentioned that chicken was something special when she was growing up in India. Of course, her dishes do taste pretty special, anyway. ___ Lily, chicken seems to appear every Sunday at my mother's when we gather for lunch. There were a few years when I absolutely wouldn't eat it--I'm not a picky eater but I was sick of it.

[Melissa]

My first thought was also: how do they eat so much every night for dinner? But the explanations of tight corsets and only taking a taste per dish makes sense.

I still have another question: how the /heck/ did the kitchen manage to produce so much food for ONE meal? It looks like they'd have to cook for three days to pull that off, and then what would people eat while they were waiting on dinner? How did they avoid certain dishes from spoiling from sitting on the counter too long? How could a household AFFORD to serve meals like this on a regular basis?

Inquiring minds want to know. :)

[Jane George]

“At three o’clock we sat down to table, which was covered with salmon at top, fennel sauce to it, melted butter, lemon pickle and soy;

Soy? As in sauce?

More inquiring minds want to know. :-)

[LorettaChase]

Melissa, the number of dishes, like everything else, would depend on the family income. According to The Complete Servant, published 1825, £100/year would allow "A Widow or other unmarried lady" to "keep a Young Maid Servant."On the other end of the scale £16000-£18000/year allowed for 27 servants. The Prince Regent had an allowance (which he overspent) many times this. Thus his enormous kitchen at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (see the picture above). "The Cook should give directions to her assistants to _rise early_, particularly when a great dinner is to be dressed." I cannot transcribe the entire section on what the cook needs to do. Suffice to say that the cook, along with his/her assistants --kitchen maid or under-cook(s) and scullery maid(s)--worked unimaginably hard. Food could and did spoil, if the cook didn't have everything perfectly coordinated. As to costs: for the well off, food was cheap (a great deal may have come from the home farm) and servants were even cheaper.

[LorettaChase]

Melissa, you asked how they did it: "it requires not only great skill but the utmost attention and exertion to send up the whole of a great dinner, with all its accompaniments, in perfect order." A few things could be prepared a day ahead, but mostly it was furious labor on the day of the dinner.__Jane George, yes, it was soy sauce. OED has it referred to as early as 1696 and Byron mentions it in a poem.

[Louis]

I've had Squirrel (somewhat like chicken) and opossum....very greasy by the way. It looks like an overlarge rat.

[Susan Sarah]

Ah, the Chicken Dinner! It's been appearing on dining tables for a very long time.

In medieval and later Scotland it was so common a dinner that it was considered an insult to serve it to guests -- and was a partial cause of a feud between two HIghland clans when one visiting chief was served a chicken dinner by the hosting clan--that was the last straw (or last wishbone), and they went at each other....those two clans were gonna fight sooner or later, but it took a rubbery chicken dinner to set it off that time.

~Susan Sarah

[Jane O]

Remember hearing about the Depression promise of/longing for "a chicken in every pot"? When I was a child, roast chicken was the classic Sunday dinner.
But going back a bit, I once (okay, 20 years ago) picked up a couple of booklets at National Trust houses on food in the 18th and 19th centuries. The not only had recipes (with modern measurements) but also talked about kitchen equpment and methods and serving styles. Fascinating. I have yet to actually try any of them, though when my daughter was in elementary school we did, for a project, make some buns from the Williamsburg cookbook which were remarkably like ordinary cinnamon buns.

[Lori]

I so enjoy this blog!
I have a question: I've often wondered this -- just WHY was the table cloth removed at the end of the meal? Was it removed and either replaced or the table left bare before the dessert or was it done when the ladies left the gentlemen to their brandy?

[Sherrie Holmes]

From Sherrie:
"they were no worse that the dietary problems promoted by our more self-indulgent diets, particularly the excessive quantities of sugar now consumed by most of us!"

AgTigress, you are so right about the self-indulgent diets and the excessive use of sugar! Though, would you believe that in the 1800s the average American consumed more sugar than we do now? I know--hard to believe, isn't it? (But then they also worked harder and longer hours, were less sedentary, and their diets consisted largely of unprocessed, unrefined foods and fresh produce.) I used to write a historical medicine column for a magazine, and you can imagine my surprise when I came across *that* little fact during research!

Re chicken. I eat chicken more than any other meat. I also like chickens as people. They're industrious and amusing, and I get a kick out of how they are always muttering to themselves, like dotty old aunts.

[NinaP]

Loretta said..."Nina, maybe it limited your intake but his corset did not do the trick for the Prince Regent, poor guy."

LOL!! I forgot about the poor prince. Wonder if his corset had a 2" wide busk running from breast to navel?

[Elaine McCarthy]

What I want to know is, what is vegetable pudding? It sounds revolting. I'm kind of curious about raised jelly, too. A curious picture comes to mind, of the jellies rising up en masse and floating through the air like little strawberry-flavored ectoplasms.

I saw a TV show not too long ago--I think I must have been in England at the time--about two people who decided to eat like Edwardians for a week. By day four they were groaning and complaining about the ill effect of lack of fiber (or fibre, I suppose) in their diet. Scary.

[LorettaChase]

Lori: At formal dinners the tablecloth was removed after a course, which consisted of many dishes that were all set out at once. After people were done with the first course, the table was cleared and the cloth removed, I assume, because it was soiled. Under it would be a clean tablecloth. According to Susan Watkins's Jane Austen's Town and Country Style, "the table would be completely relaid by the servants with diners present," and then the second, lighter, course would be served, with all its numerous dishes. The dessert course was apparently served on a bare table. The ladies departed after dessert.___Sherrie: That fact about sugar was certainly unknown to me! I am always learning something from the comments.___Nina: I know I've seen an illustration of a man's corset somewhere, but I can't put my hands on it at the moment. I'm thinking it did not have a busk. Still, if we look at other prints, it seems that corsets did not keep all ladies thin. I guess one can get used to anything--or maybe digestive problems were the price some paid for a hearty appetite.___Elaine: Puddings could be sweet or savory. "Until potatoes replaced it in our daily diet, a plain or savoury pudding was often served with meat." Think of turkey stuffing (or _dressing_ as it is referred to elsewhere in the U.S.) I can't find a recipe for Rais'd Jelly--but I can tell you this refers to a gelatin dish--what we'd call Jell-O.

[JOYE]

When I taught Home Economics, the Food in History book was in our reference library in the department. I referred to it often. It is really interesting and I read it cover to cover. I asked my students what they thought the Pilgrims ate that first week after they landed at Plymouth Rock. Most of the students thought they had alot of food and got along pretty well. I used that book to let them know how the Pilgrims struggled. I enjoy this blog more than others because it is so informative.

[LorettaChase]

Thanks, JOYE! Not far from where I live is Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum.
http://www.plimoth.org/
A visit there is a real eye-opener for most of us, who grew up with a very skewed picture of what life was like for the Pilgrims.

[RevMelinda]

I don't know much about chickens so this is a token post to enter the contest for "Lord of Scoundrels!"

Loretta, what do you think the folks in Regency England would have made of our Southern staple "chicken fried steak?"

Also, in the UK nowadays "pudding" is often used as a synonym for "dessert" (as in "what are we having for pudding?"). I wonder when that happened, as "vegetable pudding" is clearly NOT dessert (or is it, LOL?).

[LorettaChase]

RevMelinda, I have no idea what chicken fried steak is. I'm not kidding.
That "pudding" question is interesting. I usually see "dessert" or "sweets" in the reference books, but in the UK I've heard people call it "pudding." There are numerous entries for "pudding" in the OED, yet none I can find as a synonym for "dessert" or "sweets" or "afters." However, there were sweet puddings, too. This usage may have developed as dinner courses came to mean something different from what they meant to Jane Austen.

[RevMelinda]

Loretta, here's a fabulous blog entry about chicken-fried steak if you're curious. . .

http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2007/03/independence-and-chicken-fried-steak.html

[peggy]

what is your favorite holiday
book

[LorettaChase]

Peggy, I got sidetracked. Sorry to answer so belatedly. For the record, my favorite holiday book is (and this will not surprise anybody) A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens. I reread it every holiday season.

[Kathleen Smith]

Here in the United States, when I go to someone's house for dinner, I am rarely served chicken. I remember a family trip we took to South Africa in 1969. We visited a number of places that were mission sites. They served us the best they could afford. Chicken was the main dish in every locale, even the one right alongside the ocean where they caught South African lobster tails just offshore. I still shudder at times when I am served chicken.