See query. Eastern Europe/Russian/Jewish? Italian?
I, a foodie snob was thinking of it today, cutting up huge amounts of evil Purdue battery-raised fresh chicken for $1/lb, which I planned to use only for soup and throw away, and what a blessing that is compared to the old days.
So while I’m here, Happy New Year. Try the apples and honey.
It’s from *Fiddler on the Roof. *
Tevye: As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.
Mendel: Where does the book say that?
Tevye: Well, it doesn’t say that exactly, but somewhere there is something about a chicken.
Mendel’s response suggests he’s never heard the phrase before, i.e. it’s something Tevye made up.
I found this in Talmudic Proverbs “If a poor man eat a chicken, either he is sick or the chicken was sick”
What does this saying even mean? I don’t get it.
If the poor man is sick, he will get special treatment from his family or others–and thus might get an expensive treat like chicken.
If the chicken was sick, it might be cheap enough that the poor man could afford it as a regular meal.
As best I can figure, a poor man can’t afford good chicken, so either the poor man bought a sick chicken sold for cheap or the poor man was given a chicken out of charity for his own poor health.
ETA: Ninja’d by the doc!
Perhaps the chicken was kept for its eggs, but now it is sick and will die soon. May as well eat it now.
Or he’s heard the phrase but doesn’t believe it’s from the good book.
If a poor man is willing to kill his chicken, it’s either because the chicken is sick, and about to die soon, so he might as well eat it; or because he is sick, and needs some chicken soup (aka “Jewish penicillin”;)) to get better.
What’s the best-by date?
Bary Popik traced the English version of the saying back to 1945, so before Fiddler: The Big Apple: “When a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick”
Barry did that in 2009. I just used a newer newspaper database and found 1905!
Remember that you are looking at this from a place where chicken is cheap - very cheap. Back in the time when that was coined, chicken was expensive and a special treat.
I wonder if it was used in the original Sholem Aleichem stories that were the basis for Fiddler. He wrote around that time period.
Give a poor man a chicken, and he eats for a day. Teach a poor man to catch chickens…
That’s my guess. The newspaper article I found from 1905 had a headline that said “Talmudic Proverbs.” I’m sure the list could be searched to compare with his writings.
If a poor man is eating a chicken it shouldn’t be just sick, it should be dead.
In the show, Tevye is constantly misremembering or misquoting Scripture. The saying doesn’t HAVE to make perfect sense. Indeed, it’s funnier if Tevye is trying to quote Scripture and getting it wrong.
Except that it does make sense, and it appears to be a Talmudic proverb.
The recognition of chicken as an expensive dish was noted by the statement of Henry IV of France near the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, "If God keeps me, I will make sure that no peasant in my realm will lack the means to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday! and echoed in the 1928 campaign slogan for Herbert Hoover, “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”