Spring Chickens

In the spring, patchy snow still decorating fields and the sides of the gravel roads, we drove to town.  Several boxes of peeping baby chicks were loaded into the backseat beside me.  I looked through the holes in the boxes at the yellow balls of feathers climbing over each other while keeping up a chorus of peeps.

At home the chicks were taken out of the boxes and put in the brooder house.  The middle of this house contained a low, metal tent-like structure (the brooder) with light bulbs on the underside to keep the chicks warm.  Several watering bottles and trays of food surrounded the tent.  The yellow puff balls ran around on their little stick legs.  They bumped into each other and stepped in their water and food.

I liked to go into the peeping building and 'help' with the feeding and watering of the chicks as long as they were little yellow balls.  When they started growing white feathers they became unattractive and hard looking.  The waiting time for the first fried chicken started.  The chicks grew into chickens.  The weather warmed and the brooder was removed.  A fenced yard for the chickens was added outside and the brooder house became a chicken house.

Six or eight weeks after the peeping boxes were brought home, Mother started catching the larger chickens and feeling their legs to determine if they were big enough to eat.  Finally, the day arrived for the first fried spring chicken.  Of course there was work to be done.  Dad sharpened a long machete-like knife.  He caught the doomed chicken and took it to a tree stump.  With a quick chop he separated the head from the body and let the body go.  We watched it hop around spattering blood until it lay still in the grass.  The body was dunked in boiling water and the feathers removed.  Mother made a torch with rolled up newspaper, set it on fire and singed off the pin feathers.  

The chicken was cut into pieces, the legs, thighs and wings cut off the body.  The insides were taken out;  the liver and gizzard saved.   Cutting the gizzard and removing the sac of gravel and food was a delicate process--if you cut the sac the gizzard was ruined.  (No, I don't know why)  The wishbone was cut from the breast and the breast, back and neck separated.  There was a time when Suzie and I fought over the neck.

Mom's recipe for fried chicken.  Dip the chicken in flour, salt and pepper.  Brown in Crisco in an iron skillet.  Put it in the oven for 30-40 minutes.   She served those first pieces of spring chicken with boiled potatoes and home canned green beans from the cellar.

Those peeping, yellow puffballs I loved grew into fryers and hens.  The fryers had to be processed for the freezer (at the locker plant in town).   A long day of cleaning and cutting chickens.  I reluctantly participated in the various stages as I grew up.  First dipping the chicken in boiling water and removing the feathers and graduating to the rest of the steps.   I never had to cut off a head.

Beyond the fryers were the hens.  The hens that laid eggs that needed to be gathered in an enamel pail lined with straw.

At those two points in the lives of chickens, I really disliked them except of course, for dinner.