MTFCA Forum

While researching for another topic I found this charming picture of country life. The car looks like a 1926 Fordor with "dress-up hub covers".

In case you don't remember Spry. It was introduced in 1936 by Lever Brothers to compete with Crisco. So the car is 9 or more years old.

Brings back memories growing up on a family farm that was a chicken contractor. This was before the chicken conglomerates such as Tyson, Pilgrims Pride and others took over the small producers back in the early sixties.
We built the Chicken houses on our property and raised the Chickens till they were old enough to sell. The 3 houses held around 15,000 chickens. And we always had plenty of chicken for dinner!

The add about Spry and frying chicken for dinner makes me think of my Mother catching those chickens, wringing their necks and frying and baking chicken for meals. My sister and I thought we were going to turn into a chicken because we ate it 3-4 times a week! Chicken casserole pie was pretty good when it came out of the oven though! But after a while?——————————-hmmmm

Sounds like having a freezer full of beef, even that got old after a while! Was nice to have chicken or pork now and then.

The girls seem to be enjoying the task
Looks like a nickel radiator shell.

MMmmmm. My favorite was good old fashioned country chicken and dumplings! Haven't had it in nearly fifty years. Every now and again I think I really MUST learn how to cook it myself.

It is funny how all this stuff is so much about what one is used to, or familiar with. Warning, the following story contains elements not suitable for some people.
My Dad grew up on his grandparent's cattle ranch. He was used to a lot of things from that. But his grandparents and family sold the ranch when Dad was in high school. He later met my mother through a friend that was engaged to one of her sisters, and they got married. At first, he tried to adjust to working on her Dad's hundred acres of peaches. Mom and Dad lived in a secondary house on the property, and Dad got along very well with his father-in-law. Mom's parents "raised" peaches for a living, but also grew many vegetables including corn, and raised chickens. My grandmother had been "preparing" chickens for dinner for many many years. One afternoon, she asked Dad to get a chicken ready. Well, he had never done quite such a thing before, and cattle were somehow different. She pointed out the chicken she wanted (more than a couple roosters were useless), and sent him out to get it. -----Warning------ He caught it, restrained it, and got the axe ready. Took a swing, but didn't quite hit the mark. The rooster (well, most of it?) struggled loose and took off running around the yard in circles, MINUS ITS HEAD!
My grandmother never let Dad forget that. Dad would also tell me that the upside was that grandma never again asked him to get a chicken ready for cooking. Awhile after that incident, my parents moved to Nevada for about a year. Dad said he just couldn't get used to every time he turned around, there was a tree right there.

To continue in the vein some may find “inappropriate” ( really ?!?) we have always kept a flock of laying hens. What with culling the cockerels for fryers, and terminating stewing hens when they’re past optimal egg production, over the years I have stripped to the waist and donned the black hood to behead scores of gallinae. I have never seen one run or walk about sans head. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, only that it’s never happened on my watch. Perhaps it’s because we’ve always raised the heavy breeds ? Maybe my axe is too dull ? Grandpa always wrung necks but I never mastered the technique. My first attempt was possibly more traumatic than Wayne’s Dad’s, so I opted for swift, sure justice ever after. I’m very sure they never feel a thing.

This thread has deeply troubled me. What are you guys talking about? Everybody knows that chicken comes from the refrigerated meat section in the grocery store and is provided neatly packaged in plastic wrap.

Not to contradict Henry, but “reliable sources” have confirmed that chicken is the irregularly sized golden brown morsels of deep-fried “something” sold in small paper trays by Mickey D’s and other similar establishments.

This has turned out interesting about the ‘lost art of wringing a chickens neck’!
What else is questionable about Chickens is buying a whole chicken at the store and cutting
one up. More than a few folks have never cut a whole chicken at home. Use to not see fryers cut up as much as we do now at the store. Guess times have changed.

Many people don't want to acknowledge the fact that it was an animal. Packaged parts are pretty remote from neck wringing.

I've had several pointed conversation with various people over the years about hunting then having venison for dinner. Some folks just can't get past the notion that it's necessary to kill an animal for food and yet they'll go to the grocery store and buy tons of beef, pork, lamb, poultry and whatever else they can find. I guess it's absolutely NOT OK to kill anything for food yourself but it's just fine to pay someone else do it for you.

When I was a kid in the early '50's, my Mother and a few of the neighbor Ladies in our small town (90 some people) would get together from time to time to butcher chickens. I can tell you for a fact they do indeed "flop around" after being relieved of their heads, it was nothing to have 6 or 8 of them flopping all over the yard at once. Neck wringing and chopping block methods were both used. Dave

On the farm we would butcher 50-60 chickens at a time and we always had 5 gallon buckets that we would drop the chicken down into to keep them from running around after you axed them. My son who was about 8 at the time wanted to try his hand at it and we told him you need to hold on the the bird once you chopped him and set him in a bucket so they don't run. Well he thought we were just telling him a silly story so when he took his turn he set his bird down in the yard and it ran all over the place while he just giggled. He thought that was the funniest thing he ever saw. Mind you Dad was not happy.

d stroud wrote: ↑

Fri May 01, 2020 10:32 pm

. . . I can tell you for a fact they do indeed "flop around" after being relieved of their heads . . .

Flop around they will. Dave, I never said they don’t “flop around”. I have never seen one walk about or run as if they were still intact, as Dennis reported.

When I was a kid, in the 50's, we raised about a hundred chickens every year. My Dad would enlist the help of the neighbor to help with the slaughter. Dad, being a farm raised Okie, would grab the chicken by it's head and swing it in a circle over his head til the head would separate from the body and the body would fall well away from him,as it spurted blood and ran all over the yard til it dropped. George the neighbor would grab them by the legs and put their head under his boot between the sole and heel and pull til the head came off and he would sling the body away from him. Both ways were very efficient!!! One year as the oldest child I was promoted from feeder and coop cleaner to Rooster executioner. I got my Cub Scout hatchet and chased that rooster for ten minutes. I guess he just got tired. I stretched him across the chopping block, but just couldn't bring myself to do it, so my dad, who was not too happy with me, grabbed and made short work of him. The thing I miss most about them days is my Mothers fried chicken on Sunday after church. Still the BEST by far!!!

Ours often ran around, as if being chased, for an astonishingly long time before
running out of gas. Still don't understand how that works, but it did, and often.

My Dad had told me that story many times when I was growing up. So, one day, a few decades back, I stumbled into an article, believe it or not, on this very subject. (It was in some scientific magazine I was reading in a hospital waiting room.) The larger birds in our world, from ostriches on down to chickens and ducks, are our closest connection to the immediate descendants of the dinosaurs. Scientists theorize that chicken's behavior is as close as we can observe in our world today of how many of the dinosaurs behaved.
The larger dinosaurs had such slow nervous systems, that they had secondary brains located in outer areas of their bodies. The "brain" in effect, was less centralized than we think of it. Chickens, as direct descendants of the last flying dinosaurs, have enough basic autonomic function down in the neck, that once beheaded, many of them can still (apparently) balance, walk, run blindly, and even survive for a short time (if the arteries are sufficiently pinched off).

I think we may be setting new records for thread drift here?