You know how in preindustrial times there were no refrigerators and people used other methods to preserve foods, such as drying or salting or ice-freezing. Did people eat the chicken immediately after slaughter, or did they wait a while? How long should they wait before the chicken spoil or would be considered ‘tainted meat’? Did people try to prepare chicken meat during rigor mortis or some time after rigor mortis? Does a medieval chicken taste any differently from a modern chicken?
Also, why does a chicken have blue feet? Chauntecleer, one famous chicken, has blue feet! What kind of domesticated chicken he is?
Chicken is self-preserving in the sense that you let them run around until you chop their heads off. Game birds are “hung” (meaning allowed to go off a bit) to make them more tender. There’s no need to preserve a chicken because it’s essentially family sized as is; not like a cow or a pig.
Another thing to consider is the age of the bird itself. The broilers you find in most supermarkets today are typically slaughtered when they are between 4-8 weeks old; well before they lay their first egg.
I would suspect during the Middle Ages most chickens would have been more mature because they couldn’t afford to forgo harvesting the eggs. I wouldn’t doubt that most chickens sold at market were those that had already passed their best egg laying days.
Older hens are much tougher in comparison: the meat is much leaner, the gristle is stringier, and the skin is kind of rubbery with a bit of snap to it when you bite down.
They are quite common in Chinese cuisine because they are more flavorful and hold up much better in a soups and braised dishes. I prefer them to broilers (except for frying and roasting) and find them a source of comfort food. My parent’s always prepare some drunken chicken for me when I come over :).
Just like today on family farms, they would eat the cockerels when they were young and tender, and the hens after they came to the end of their useful egglaying lives (4 or 5 years at most). You stew the old hens, and roast or broil or fry the young cockerels. Chicken would be eaten the day it was killed.
On family/homestead farms today, many people buy some dozens of day old males from a hatchery and butcher them at optimal age, and put them in the freezer for a year’s supply. Before rural electrification but after canning technology, people would can chicken, but it is risky (botulism). In medieval times, when your broody hen hatched out your eggs, you would only get a half dozen or so males in a clutch so you’d butcher as need arose.
There was also, by the way, capon (well, there still is but not in the Piggly Wiggly) - castrated chicken, just like other animals we castrate. Only there’s obviously a lot more skill to it. Makes the males tastier.
In my experience in refrigerator free countries, you’d generally slaughter chickens when you are ready to eat them. My local restaurant in Cameroon, for example, let about five or six chickens roam free in the bathroom- a number that would gradually decrease as the day went on.
Chickens would be pretty expensive and a pain in the butt for ordinary people on a daily basis, and so they’d be something you generally raise to sell rather than consume yourself. You might have chicken for holidays or special occasions, but feeding a family with chicken wouldn’t be viable for an ordinary family on a regular basis.
This means that mostly, when you want a chicken you’d go to the market and buy a live one. The chicken would be much leaner, but most striking would be the absence of the huge bloated breasts our chickens are bred for.
Notwithstanding all of the above, chicken was nowhere near as prevalent in the diet as it is today - it was only one player in quite a big picture. Rabbits were hunted/trapped and/or kept for fur and meat, pigeons were kept for eggs and meat (either grown birds or squabs), as well as ducks, geese, etc and of course larger livestock.
The reason chicken is now dirt-cheap and common when it once was quite expensive (note the idea of “city chicken”, which tended to be pork) is that chickens are now bred to be sufficiently uniform in size that they can be slaughtered factory-style. The idea of “a chicken in every pot” sounds like “everybody will have enough food to live on” now, but at the time it was a promise of prosperity and even extravagance.
A sheet music version of the song “An Actor’s Life for Me” from the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio, about the glamor and luxury of being a theatrical star, included the lyrics “You tour the world in a private car [meaning a railroad car], you dine on chicken and caviar…”
Chicken certainly wasn’t as expensive or high-toned as caviar itself, but it was similar enough that they could be mentioned in the same breath as “rich folks’ food”.
The OP also asked about the taste. When my son was about four, I moved to a place that had a butcher shop. Previous to that I bought the supermarket (Foster Farms) chicken and so when I cooked the butcher shop chicken, my son took one bite and asked, “What’s that taste?” to which I replied, “That’s what chicken tastes like.”
Note also that in modern times, chickens are bred for different destinations; there are ‘laying’ chickens and ‘eating’ chickens. Just like dairy and beef cattle, they have different growth rates, body configurations, etc.
My mother had a coop full of egg-laying chickens; we would slaughter them at the end of the season, before winter. But there was very little meat on those chickens, it seemed they put everything into producing eggs. Mom claimed that it took 2 or 3 of those birds for a single meal.
