1930’s Chicken Flikken

January 1, 1930

This is what it looked like when our Mothers flikked the chickens

In the early 1930’s, when we were children, women bought the chicken, the butcher would kill the chicken for them, but they had to scald it so they could defeather it, cut it apart so they could kosher it, use the fattest parts for chicken soup, and of course we ate all the parts, including the neck and the pupick, parts which rarely see today.

Abe’s Mother used a duck wing with the feathers still on it to brush oil on her dough when she baked. Koshering consisted of laying the pieces out on absorbent paper, sprinkling each piece with coarse kosher salt, and letting it sit for half an hour. Abe’s mother used a wooden bushel lid. But then of course, she could get a new clean bushel lid because her husband was in the Produce Yards. Then you turned each piece over and sprinkled the other side, letting it sit. This would pull the blood out of the chicken, as we are not allowed to eat the blood.

For ground meat, our Mothers would select the piece of meat at the butcher’s, bring it home and kosher it, then take it back to the butcher to have it ground. The only meat you didn’t have to kosher was meat you would broil, because the blood would be able to drip.

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