City Chicken

City chicken is an American entrée consisting of cubes of meat, typically pork, which have been placed on a wooden skewer (approximately long), then fried or baked. Depending on the recipe, they may be breaded. Despite the name of the dish, city chicken almost never contains chicken.

History

A similar dish once known as "mock chicken" was described as early as 1908. The first references to city chicken appeared in newspapers and cookbooks just prior to and during the Depression Era in a few cities such as Pittsburgh. City chicken is typically a makeshift drumstick fashioned from meat scraps by skewering them. It was a working-class food item. During the Depression, cooks used pork or veal because it was then cheaper than chicken in many cities, especially meat packing centers such as Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, and Pittsburgh, where such cuts were more readily available than chicken.

Sometimes cooks would grind the meat and use a drumstick-shaped mold to form the ground meat around a skewer. One such mold, manufactured by AMPCO/BKI, was labeled chicken ''sans volaille'' (without poultry).

The dish is still popular in the Binghamton, New York, area, where at the turn of the 20th century along with the growth of factories (especially EJ, cigar companies, Kilmer, etc.) the town was supplied with workers from immigrant communities abroad as well as from the coal mines of Pennsylvania, stone quarries of northern New York, etc. Many or most of these were from more rural areas where farming for personal use to supplement their jobs was common (e.g., small vegetable gardens, hogs and chickens). In the tenement and row houses in Binghamton and Johnson City, New York, of that era it was rare to have enough land to raise chickens, but slaughterhouses (pork, lamb, veal, and beef) could still be located "in town". The idea of breading veal or pork like fried chicken became a cheaper and popular meal.

Distribution

The dish is popular in cities throughout the central and eastern Great Lakes region of Ohio and Michigan as well as the northeastern Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, and at least as far south and west as Louisville, Kentucky. City chicken is commonly found in the metropolitan areas of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Binghamton, Erie, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Scranton, hence, the dish's "urban" title. In Canada, it is quite popular in the ethnic Ukrainian regions of the west, and the deli-counter version is popular in the Ottawa Valley and Kitchener area.

Variations

While preparations regionally vary, pork is typically the base meat used in most versions of the recipe. Pittsburgh-area city chicken is almost always breaded and usually baked, while in Binghamton, New York, the meat is marinated, battered and then deep fried. The Cleveland version is generally baked without breading and instead the meat is dredged in flour, browned in a pan, then finished in the oven, and served with gravy. Grocery stores sell city chicken in both the Greater Cleveland area and the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. In the Detroit metropolitan area, since the early 1900s, wooden skewers with chunks or wrapped pork, veal, and lamb has been specifically prepared as city chicken. In Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, at least one variation involves skewers of three kinds of meat: pork, veal, and beef. Another Canadian variation, from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was composed entirely of veal.

In Cincinnati, the dish appeared on the 1933 lunch menu of upscale La Normandie as baked city chicken "en brochette".

In 1940, Crisco ran national ads featuring a recipe for city chicken, which gave the dish "some national traction", according to Keith Pandolfini writing in the ''Cincinnati Enquirer''.

See also

* Chicken fried steak
* Spiedie
*Souvlaki
*Kebab
*Kushikatsu
* Chislic

References

Sources

Various Recipes

* ttp://kellysrecipes.com/city-chicken City Chicken
{{portal bar, Food

Skewered foods
Culture of Cleveland
Cuisine of the Midwestern United States
American pork dishes
Historical foods in American cuisine