SC - Chicken usage

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Uduido at aol.com wrote:

> Because the majority, if not all, of period recipe books were written for
> noble households, would not the proliferation of chicken recipes indicate
> that they were in fact not a common food item? Case in point would be the
> nobleman's desire to impress his guests with his wealth by serving  as many
> exotics as possible. What better way than to serve chicken. Just a tho't but
> , IMHO, not an unreasonable one. Conversely the less often an item is
> mentioned, the more "common" it may have been. Responce?
> 
> Lord Ras (Uduido at aol.com)

I think the fact is that sometimes a cigar is just a chicken, or
something like that. The proliferation of chicken recipes (if there is
one; I would have thought pork took first prize, but I'll bow to the
judgement of the statisticians among us) might or might not be a
function of the nobles' supposed attempts at conspicuous consumption.

I also would be inclined to figure that chicken recipes abound for
another very simple reason: There is no hunting or slaughtering season
for domestic fowl. You don't have to wait for lambing, or weaning, or
for the first frost, or for the salt to be soaked out. You just kill the
bird and eat it. As such, it is eminently more practical than a number
of other meat alternatives.

Adamantius