Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ive to other chickens of the era; they dressed clean and had a buttery yellow skin.
True-
breeding
purebred APA-recognized Cornish birds produced a larger carcass with a firm
flesh but were not popular because they did not grow as fast.
In times past, it was customary for these backyard chickens to take 12 to 16 weeks
to grow to the preferred size and maturity for butchering. A twelve-week-old, 2- to
4-pound (1-2 kg) bird was thought to be a perfect young fryer chicken. Many feed stores
gave out free day-old White Leghorn cockerels and hoped you would come back peri-
odically to buy feed.
Society has changed since the Leghorn was considered the picture of quick-fry per-
fection. Now, a majority of consumers want chickens to have more breast meat and less
leg and thigh meat than the Leghorn can offer. Breast meat seems to be the most popular
thing in today's on-the-go culture, sparking a change in chicken breeding.
WHERE'S THE BIRD?
Convenience may have fueled the consumer taste for birds with a huge percentage
of white meat and a very large breast. The U.S. population has trended away from
adults working in the home and preparing traditional meals eaten together as a family
and toward the drive-thru fast-food sandwich demands of families with two working
parents. We are a society on the run and the humble chicken is caught in the process.
Many youths of today have never had a baked or stewed chicken, or chicken and
dumplings made from an old hen. When I first started teaching in 1984, you could
count on fried chicken for school lunch at least once a month. Now it has been years
since fried chicken (with bones!) has graced the school lunch menu; instead, chick-
en sandwiches or nuggets with sauce appear at least once a week. Consider this: As
we educate our youth, we are also training them to be future eaters of rapidly raised
chicken, covered with flavor-enhanced coatings to make up for the lack of natural
flavors attained with a reasonable, healthy growth period.
No longer do you find feed stores handing out free Leghorns. Instead, you see people
of all sorts from farmers to backyarders raising the Cornish Cross, or “broiler chickens”
as they have come to be known. Frequently these chickens reach maturity at eight to ten
weeks of age, and sometimes in as few as six weeks. They grow to be 6- to 10-pound
(2.7-4.5 kg) butchered carcass in that short period of time! The carcass of these birds is
largely breast meat; short on leg and thigh meat compared to the Leghorns, they are still
very tender. The butchering process is slightly different from that of a traditional bird
because they are so quick to mature they do not develop a very thick skin. (See
chapter
