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.