Growing Up in Williamsport, Ohio

How to Kill and Clean a Chicken
 
Most young people today think that a chicken comes from the store or even a fast food restaurant. In the forties, a local farmer would stop by the house asking if we wanted to buy one. If no one came, my mother would ask my Dad to go to a farm south of town and buy a big fat hen.
 
The farmer or my Dad would come carrying the doomed chicken by its feet. My Dad usually killed the chicken but every now and then it fell to my mother to do the execution. She didn’t like to do it but was, more or less, up to the job.
 
She carried the chicken by its feet between the garden and the coal house. As far as I can remember, she laid the chicken on the ground with her foot on the chicken’s feet and chopped its head off with a hatchet. It was awkward sometimes and required more than one try. Then she let the chicken go and it flopped all over that area until its nerves stopped working. She had already boiled a galvanized bucket of water on the stove. She brought the bucket out and holding the chicken by its feet, dunked it into the boiling water. That caused her to be able to pull the feathers out easily. She then carried the chicken in the house to hold over the flame on the gas stove to singe off the remaining hairs (it was an awful smell).
 
She then put the chicken in a white enameled dishpan to clean it out and cut it up. My mother liked the chicken’s tail, so she had to cut out the oil sack on it. Betty and I were always standing in the kitchen doorway watching this chicken operation. I’m not sure but I think she removed the neck first so she could get the craw out. It was full of small rocks, corn, etc. She removed the entrails from the bottom of the bird. I remember seeing them float around in the dishpan. There is a blue gall bladder that has to be cut out because it would make the chicken bitter if it were cut into. Sometimes the fat hen had a sack full of immature eggs. My mother usually cooked the hen along with the eggs. They were better than eggs that have already been laid. I think chickens tasted better in those days than they do today.
 
I lived at home my first year of college and babysat Ricky, Jackie and Pattie after school for Shorty and Janet Hooks. Janet worked on the second shift at GE and Shorty worked for Dunlap’s. One day she asked me to cut-up a chicken for her to fry the next day. It was my first one. That poor chicken had so many pieces when I got done, Janet must have wondered what happened.
 
Soooo, what’s for dinner tonight? Chicken anyone? KFC, Canes, Chic-Filet? 
 
Maybe not.
                             
©Marilyn Francis Ferguson 2020
Photography/graphics by Michele Ferguson Schuck
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