#Chicken nuggit in a biskit two skin
#Chicken nuggit in a biskit two free

If a quick and easy Tuesday night dinner was what you had in mind, you needed a broiler or a fryer. After fryers came roasters, and last came “fowl” - old hens that were so tough, they could be used only in soups and stews. Next came fryers, which were a bit bigger and less tender, but still small. There were broiler chickens, which were young and tiny - some weighed in at just a pound and a half - and so tender you could cook them under a scorching-hot broiler. It was expensive by modern standards, and since chickens were often the by-product of the egg industry, they came in a range of sizes. Pierce wanted to stop that from happening.Ĭhicken of the 1940s was nothing like it is today. But with the war over, Pierce worried that the spike in chicken consumption would come to a crashing end. As red meat was rationed, Americans almost doubled the amount of chicken they ate. World War II, which had just ended, had been good to chicken farmers. The Chicken of Tomorrow contest was conceived by Howard “Doc” Pierce, who was national poultry research director with A&P Food Stores, one of the largest grocery chains of the time.įor anyone in the chicken business, the late 1940s was the best of times, but also the worst of times. Food has changed.Ĭhicken’s descent into blandness began in March 1948, in Easton, Maryland, at a grand event that would determine the way soups, broths and braises of chicken would taste for decades to come. We tend to dismiss it as the rose-tinted memory of times past or the result of failing taste buds. It’s a complaint we hear often from the blue-hair set. It had nothing to do with her cookware, her oven, the thickness of her dumplings, her gravy, the amount of salt and spices she used, the hardness of her tap water or any of the usual variables a home cook might place under the beam of doubt.Īll that time, the problem was the flavor of the chicken itself. The woman’s mistake, it turned out, had nothing to do with the recipes she’d been using.

#Chicken nuggit in a biskit two free

As the tears flowed, she said, “I just wanted to call and thank you so much.” Nothing tastes like it used to Free range chickens, barred rock breed, in Martha’s Vineyard. She was on the phone with the farmer who raised the chicken, an heirloom-poultry buff named Frank Reese, of Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch, whom she’d never met or spoken to before. It was at this point in the story that the woman began weeping. This time, he swallowed his dumplings and delivered the news she’d been waiting almost 50 years to hear: “This is my mother’s chicken and dumplings.” And that, it seemed, is how it was fated to be.įor whatever reason, the woman decided to give chicken and dumplings one more try with the barred-rock chicken from Krehbiels.

After close to a half-century of marriage, she was married to a man who still missed his mother’s chicken. But as the years turned into decades, his judgment never wavered.

It was one of her husband’s favorite dishes, but every time she made it, his verdict was always the same: “Not as good as my mother’s.” During the course of her 48 years of marriage, chicken had only ever brought disappointment. The woman purchased one and took it back home, an hour south to Wichita. This chicken was a throwback, a variety nearly vanished since the 1950s and still raised the old-fashioned way, outdoors, where it ate blades of grass, leaves, seeds, bugs and whatever else it could put its beak on.

#Chicken nuggit in a biskit two skin

The chicken had longer legs, a smaller breast and yellower skin than regular chickens, and on the back appeared two words the woman, who was in her 70s, would not have seen in a very long time: “barred rock.” In the town of McPherson, Kansas, there is a butcher shop called Krehbiels Meats, where, not long ago, an elderly woman bought a chicken that moved her to tears. To those who doubt the blandness of modern chicken, consider the following story: As author Mark Schatzker describes in his new book, “The Dorito Effect,” that all changed starting in 1948, with a contest to make chickens more plentiful - and less delicious. It’s an old joke - if you can’t describe a flavor, say it “tastes like chicken.” But chicken wasn’t always synonymous with generic.