Chicken Cookery

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of colonial foodways ignored the chicken for the most part. In the earliest manuscripts to enter America there are, of course, chicken recipes for roasts, stews, and pies, and none other than Governor William Byrd II was dining on the iconic southern dish of fried chicken at his Virginia plantation by 1709. But most culinary descriptions praise the abundant wild game that so caught visitors’ eyes and make scant mention of the barnyard fowl. Nor do platters of chicken occupy prestigious spots on the meticulously diagrammed table layouts; these, too, were reserved for wild birds and game. This is not to suggest that chickens were not widely eaten; virtually every colonial American archaeological site shows evidence of chicken consumption. Chicken merely suffered an image problem, possibly attributable to its husbandry.