'Swingeing' the Sunday chicken

Have you heard? They've bred featherless chickens! What next? Skinless pigs? De-whiskered cats? My question is, why? A flock of featherless chickens would be downright ugly. Maybe they would save Tyson, the big Arkansas chicken processors, a step in their production. But think of the by-products that would be wasted: feathers.

This is the way we processed chickens, say for Sunday dinner: First you had to catch the chicken, which I never found easy to do. If the flock had been cooped up, when you opened the door, the hysterical chickens would fly right into your face. If lucky, you might catch a plump pullet, a requirement for Sunday dinner.

With pullet in hand, you turned it over to someone who was deft with wringing its head off, a thing I never did nor watched being done.

In the meantime you must have prepared about two gallons of boiling water. After the headless chicken had stopped flopping around, you assumed it was dead and plunged it into the boiling water. There was no ASPCA then.

As you may know, the boiling water loosens the feathers, and you can pull them off by the handful if in a hurry. Otherwise, you pull the big wing feathers first and lay them aside to dry in case there are kids around who love to make Indian headdresses like those on the red-backed Big Indian Chief tablets.

Next are the body feathers, which you carefully remove and spread out to dry, for they are makings of pillows and featherbeds.

Next comes the "swingeing." We all knew the proper word was singeing, but Grandma gave it that good old Midwestern elocution, and we followed her lead. With the "w" in it, it does seem to imply that was a better method.

For "swingeing" you took a page of newspaper, a match and found a bare place to set the paper on fire. Then you passed the chicken through the flames to singe away the tiny fragile fuzz which you couldn't get off any other way. You think that was the final process? Nope. There were those pinfeathers, incipient feathers, getting ready to replace any feathers that were about to be shed. The pinfeathers were still enclosed in a horny sheath just below the skin, with a dark spot at the end which would become the feather. It was important to pluck these out, else you would chew them along with the crispy skin. It took tweezers to do this.

Finally the chicken was ready to be cut into serving pieces. Sharp knife a must. First the thigh, with drumstick attached. This left a nice cavity so that you could reach in to see what you could find. If the pullet was along toward maturity, there might be a yolk already being formed. Don't discard. It is edible. Then there were little pieces of lungs to scratch out. What is done with the liver and gizzard is up to the cook. I say, keep the liver, throw away the gizzard.

Off comes the neck. Pitch it, too, unless you are starving for chicken necks. De-wing the Sunday dinner entree. Remove the wishbone. Have you seen any lately? Tyson merged them with the breastbone. Crack the ribs apart and you're nearing the final process.

This process involves the big, cast iron skillet, sometimes called a spider. Two large curls of lard go into the spider. The cut-up pieces are dipped in buttermilk, rolled in seasoned flour and placed gently into the slightly sizzling lard.

When the pieces are golden brown, put them on a platter, set it in the warming oven and hurry off to church and back, starving.

When the bones begin to pile up on the plates and the wishbone ritual is over, someone will push his chair back from the table and say, "That was a mighty fine meal." The process is over. Sorry, Tyson, it is better this way.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.