There have been horsemeat butcher shops in Paris since the 1869 Prussian blockade.
The French are not squeamish about horsemeat. Which horrifies the Brits, who adore their horses.
The French adore their horses too. Preferably with sauce béarnaise.
Doc Severinsen was (and presumably still is) an aficionado of horsemeat. He once brought a horsemeat hamburger onto The Tonight Show for Johnny Carson to try.
Carson said the only difference he could tell between horsemeat and beef was that horsemeat was a little bit sweeter.
Born in 61 and remember chicken as being a standard staple in all of the households I was aware of. Midwest so maybe other areas were different.
In the 70’s to early 80’s in Pittsburgh, city chicken was chunks of pork alternated with chunks of veal on a skewer, breaded and fried in a pan. As time went by, it changed to pork only, due to costs, I suppose.
In Minnesota, it was ground veal, breaded and on sticks, like pronto pups. As noted above, it was tasty when deep-fried.
I lived in Pittsburgh for several years (1980s) and City Chicken was common and always pork.
During the Depression though, who knows what went in there?
Correct. There is a well known recipe from the original King Henry IV (the Good One, as he was known)
I’ve never had city chicken, but from old cookbooks I have, I do know it as the mock chicken dish made from veal, as Ukulele Ike mentions. Which, to me, seems really crazy in this day and age and comparative prices.
Here’s the thing - in the bad old days when dairies were small and often local the cows had to be bred every year to keep producing milk, and 50% of those calves (being pre-artificial insemination/sperm sorting times) were males, which were largely useless, and probably they didn’t need all the females, either. These days, a dairy cow lives about 5-6 years (then they’re culled - absent such a premature death they can live up to 20 years) but in the old days they might have been kept longer and, assuming pregnancy/calving every one-to-two years you’d wind up with a cow giving birth to a half dozen or maybe even a dozen calves instead of just one replacement so… lots of extra calves. Which, even at birth, are larger than chickens. And you gotta do something with those extra calves, and feeding them is a cost, so…
… that’s how we got veal. Extra, unwanted, unneeded calves but you wouldn’t want that much meat to go to waste, but when you slaughter a calf that’s quite a bit of meat so you need to do something with it quickly, and at the same time there’ll be a lot of other veal calves being slaughtered so you’ll have a glut, which drives the value down.
Meanwhile, a laying hen these days lives maybe 2 years before being culled. Maybe in the old days you’d get 3-4 years if you didn’t mind a fall-off in number of eggs, but thing is, there are no surplus eggs/chickens in the sense of being unwanted/unneeded. Humans will happily eat all the eggs produced, and to replace any old/deceased hens you just hatch a few eggs out instead of snatching them early. A good laying hen is valuable, and everything she produces is valuable. But chickens don’t weigh that much. You can keep 'em around, slaughter one or two as needed, feed the rest on scraps and let 'em root for bugs on their own. You can avoid a glut of chicken meat that needs to be used up quickly. Chickens lay eggs all year long, so you can incubate and hatch new ones more or less as needed instead of having annual gluts - unlike cows, which all tend to calve around the same time.
So you’ll have fewer “surplus” chickens, given that so many potential chickens will be eaten as eggs. I could see a good laying hen being worth more in some ways than an unneeded veal calf.
These days, though, we produce so many eggs and chickens that individuals are no longer precious. Meanwhile, thanks to modern artificial reproduction, the only time a dairy cow is going to produce a bull might be when the farmer decides he needs a new bull, all the other dairy calves might well be female and therefore more likely to be retained as part of the future dairy herd. Even those slated for the dinner table, though, are fed and allowed to grow for 6-8 months to produce the maximum amount of veal-like meat per animal so, unlike in the past, those animals actually have value and the cost of sustaining them for half a year is now incorporated into their price tag, which increases the cost to the consumer. We can also keep meat safely for a lot longer than a 150-200 years ago, so when all those “extra” calves are slaughtered the meat doesn’t have to be sold immediately, which avoid seasonal gluts and also helps sustain the price of veal in a steady manner.
It also doesn’t help when the public gets a hair up and decides you shouldn’t cure sick chickens with medicine and you have to slaughter and burn somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million a year worldwide because of bird flu and other illnesses … which ended a glut on the poultry market a few years back
I was born in 1961 and can never remember a time when beef steak was cheaper than chicken. If it had been, we would have had steak regularly. In the early to mid 70s, cheap chicken led to the dreadful abomination that is the chicken frank. The taste wasn’t much worse than cheaper brands of franks, but the texture was rubbery.
I saw a list somewhere claiming fried chicken was the single most common meal during the 1970s. While I have no idea if this is actually true, many family meals included Shake & Bake and rotisserie chicken.
I suspect chicken was always relatively available to the middle class after the 1920s, except when depressions supervened.
If your city chicken was dry, your mom wasn’t cooking it right. My mom used alternating cubes of pork and veal and then browned it in oil before putting it in the oven to bake.
The other local dish cooked on skewers, spiedies, was originally lamb or beef, but is now mostly chicken with some pork.
When did James Garner start doing those “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” commercials? That would probably be a good indicator of when chicken became the main meat. Why make those ads otherwise? The same thing with those pork commercials pushing “the other white meat”.
I’m too old to remember, but in the early 70s, there was a big price in the spike of beef that led to Nixon trying to put price controls in place. That probably got a bunch of people to switch from beef to cheaper chicken.
My husband pretty much refused to eat poultry in general when younger. In recent years, he’s developed more of a tolerance for chicken, but still doesn’t care for turkey. His preferred meat is ground beef.
Rabbit is a common meat in much of Europe; there are recipes for which rabbit is more popular than chicken, others where rabbit is more popular (it stands stewing better than chicken), others that can be used with both if maybe a little tweaked (roasted rabbit can end up too dry on the legs if you’re not careful), and even some which use both together. To me it seems as if it’s the US that tends to be the outlier when it comes to food.
I was watching a show on Italian cooking Friday night, in which the old dude with the English accent stewed rabbit in a sauce with vine-ripe tomatoes and lots of olive oil. It looked yummy! :o
my foster parents raised rabbits for meat … I miss southern fried rabbit
i had a crash course in skinning and butchering one day …foster mom was away for the weekend So foster dad said well we can have chicken on Saturday and ill fry us up some rabbit for after church on Sunday
me and bro were like yay!.. so we wen tout to feed said rabbits and chickens and were playing with them like little kids do but there was one specific chicken i didn’t like and she was nice and plump and she pecked me for the last time …he walked us over and had us dig a hole …then we boiled a huge pot of water …
I asked " what’s all this gotta do with getting dinner … he just said “patience boy” he grabbed evil chicken flopped it on a stump whacked its head off let it run around then picked it up plopped it in the water handed me a pair of needle-nose pliers and said put the feathers in the hole …
And he brought over the older rabbit that was separated for trying to kill its offspring and he hung it by the leg from a noose and bopped it twice with a length of pipe over a bucket he took a knife and slit it open innards went in the bucket and I retched and fainted cause …well barf …
after I picked up myself offa the ground he kept I think the liver heart and something else for gravy (it was yummy) handed me the bucket and pointed to the hole where the chicken remains we weren’t eating went in and I started filling the hole as he went to find my 5-year-old brother who was having a fit about we killed the bunny…
after that we were jaded about such things because wed had that scenario a dozen times…i hated plucking chickens tho …
My experience in New Zealand matches this exactly. One of those cultural touchstones the two countries share, I guess.
You can find old cookbooks from the late 19th and early 20th century with recipes for disguising veal as chicken. Chickens were more valued for their ability to lay many eggs over their lifetime than they were for their meat which you could only eat once. Fried chicken, which is made from a young hen, was something of a luxury item. The first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise started in 1952 so I would imagine by then chicken was fairly common.