Perhaps more than anything else, what makes us stand before the world
as a deplorably ungastronomic nation is our tolerance of the tainted,
unpalatable, cold-storage poultry served in public eating places as
well as in private houses in nine cases out of ten.
We spent the months of May to September, 1912, in Europe, traveling in
France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and England. Nearly every day we
ate chicken, or some other kind of poultry and not once did we have
any that was in the least like our cold-storage fowls; everything was
fresh, sweet, juicy, and appetizing. Again and again I said to my wife,
or she to me: "I wish we could get such chicken in New York!"
An American lady of wealth said to me a few years ago that one of the
reasons why she went to Europe every summer was that she liked good
things to eat and could get them so much more easily and regularly
abroad--particularly butter, and her favorite dish, chicken. She knew
of the poulet de Bresse--that explained it all. I shall never forget,
though I live another half-century, my first taste of that particular
brand of fowl. I had arrived at one of the leading Paris hotels too
late for the table d'hôte, and thinking I was not hungry, ordered
nothing but a portion of chicken and a bowl of salad. The waiter
brought an enormous portion, and I had hardly tasted it when I found I
was ravenously hungry. Not a shred of it was left.
The delicious taste of that sort of fancy poultry is due in part to the
particular breed, but more still to the use of special kinds of food
which give a rich and delicate flavor to the flesh, as the so-called
wild celery of the Chesapeake Bay does in the case of our best ducks
and turtles.
Nature provides our canvasback and redhead ducks and terrapin--not too
bountifully, it is true--but when it comes to mortal man's treatment,
in this country, of the poultry that has to take the place of the
formerly abundant game, what do we see? A state of affairs that would
not be tolerated one week on the European continent.
It is officially estimated that from 75 to 90 per cent. of all the
poultry produced in the United States is preserved in cold storage
for months, often for years. What is worse still, "only a very small
percentage of the fowls which are placed in cold storage are drawn,"
the result being that by a physiological process known as osmosis the
meat becomes tainted in a most offensive manner. The warehouse men
and dealers have for years been fighting furiously against the health
boards of various cities and states for the privilege of perpetuating
this state of affairs, which greatly simplifies the poultry business
and enables them to sell the entrails of a fowl at the same price
per pound as the meat; but the long-suffering public has at last
become thoroughly aroused, convinced that many obscure disorders of
the digestive tract are due to the consumption of undrawn and other
cold-storage poultry, not to speak of the horror of eating such stuff.
A young woman informs me that one day she went into a butcher's shop
(in a part of town where prosperous families live) and ordered a
chicken. The butcher took one down, but when he cut it open such a
stench came from it that she stepped back in horror. Yet the man tried
to persuade her to take it, remarking: "That's all right! Just wash
it in a solution of borax, or in vinegar and water and the odor will
disappear."
This happened in New York City in the year 1912; it was not an
exceptional case; thousands of such offensive carcasses are sold
in American cities daily. Nor is it necessary to cut them open to
know that they are unfit for food. Their greenish, mummified, rigid
appearance reveals their unpalatable condition. Daily, for years, as
I have walked along the streets of New York and seen these hideous
bird corpses brazenly exposed for sale, I have wondered at a community
which will tolerate such a thing. As the authors of Bulletin No. 115 of
the Bureau of Chemistry[3] say, a careful inspection of cold-storage
fowls before cooking "would do much to destroy any appetite which might
otherwise have been manifested for these birds when cooked."
On pages 100-101 of his monumental work on foods and their adulteration
which should be read by all consumers as well as dealers because of its
impartial statement of the case, Dr. Wiley remarks pertinently that
"the keeping of chickens with the intestinal contents undisturbed does
not appeal to the imagination of the consumer any more than would the
freezing of the carcass of a beef or hog with the viscera remaining in
it."
Elsewhere the great reformer put his finger on the most vulnerable and
undeniable aspect of the storage business: "Palatability is one of the
elements of wholesomeness, and we find in cold storage _a tremendous
decrease in palatability_."
From this kind of tainted, unappetizing, unpalatable chicken to the
poulet de Bresse, what a long road we have to travel. Under present
conditions, as a matter of course, it makes no difference what we
feed our fowls; all are foul alike, and will remain so as long as the
American public remains content to fall so far below the European
gastronomic level.
The packers and dealers, of course, laugh at Dr. Wiley's statement
that, under the present scientific methods of production, poultry can
be furnished in a fresh state all the year round (as it is in Europe).
They do not want it fresh; they want it in their refrigerators so they
can regulate and artificially raise prices. The worst offenders are the
men who speculate in storage fowls, making, say, $10,000 or $20,000
in one day. That enables them to cross the Atlantic and eat _edible_
chicken in Paris.
The simplest way for the consumer to thwart the conspirators against
his appetite and stomach is to buy of genuinely Kosher butchers, who by
their tenets are not allowed to handle cold-storage fowls; or direct of
the farmer, with whom an arrangement can be made to send the freshly
killed and promptly cleaned poultry to one's home. In this way the
total cost does not exceed regular city prices, and oh! the difference
in the effect on our well-being, not to speak of getting even with the
"icemen."
The introduction of parcel's post greatly reduced the cost of this
method of securing fresh poultry. In European countries, particularly
France and Germany, the parcel's post has done much to eliminate
middlemen, and many thousands of consumers make use of this chance to
get provisions fresh and direct from the producer.
There are reasons to believe that the present high prices of beef and
mutton will never come down again, but will climb higher still because
the former vast grazing-grounds of the West are being cut up into
farms. But to the raising of chickens there is no limit. By applying
the methods of intensive farming the supply can be steadily increased
and prices lowered. Chicken day is destined to become more and more
frequent, and it is for the consumer to decide whether his chicken
dinner shall be appetizing, enjoyable, and beneficial, or remain what
it is now in most cases, a gastronomic calamity.
From the point of view of Flavor, which is the main theme of the
present volume, this subject is of such importance that a few more
pages must be devoted to it.