How to Butcher a Chicken for Dinner

Musings of a midwest farmer's daughter.

I was recently thinking about a comment my mother made one early spring morning. “If it is the only thing I’ll teach you it is how to feed yourself. You never know when we’ll have another Great Depression. I watched my mother cook all kinds of stuff to feed the family—even chicken-head soup. We wasted nothing back then.”

This challenging economy has revived memories of my youth, growing up on a small family Midwestern farm in the 1970-80s. We had pigs, chickens, cows, a garden every summer, and lots of crops.  One thing I dreaded every spring was something called “Cleaning the Chickens.”

Granted, this activity enabled me to grow while avoiding starvation, but partly because of this ritual, I converted to vegetarianism as soon as I moved out of the house. Well, truthfully, I also had to convert for health reasons. The important thing is that my family loved me very much, and made sure I could fend for myself no matter what the economy was doing. I digress…

In light of the current economic downturn, I’ve been thinking I should get some chickens for the back yard and start fattening them up.

For those ivy-league college graduates looking for that non-existent job, listen up. Here are ten steps to your next meal, assuming you’ve been feeding your chickens and they are now nice and plump and ready to meet the big rooster in the sky.

1)  Grab the chicken by the feet and hang it upside down. It can smell its impending death by the way you grab it, so be gentle. If you’re releasing nervous vibes, it will try with all its might peck you.

2)  Place the neck between two nails that have been pounded into a sawed-off tree trunk.

3)  Grab the hatchet sitting next to you and in one strong swoop, sever the head from the neck. Throw the neck onto the ground unless saving for stew at a later date.

4)  Put the chicken neck first into a 1-gallon milk jug, previously placed into a hole in the ground spout down. This will allow the blood to drain and the feet to kick like crazy (like a chicken with its head chopped off!).

5)  Once the feet stop flapping, grab the feet and pull the body out of the temporary plastic coffin.

6)  Place the limp body into a large pot of boiling water to loosen the feathers. Try to avoid breathing because the molecules from the smell will imbed into your nasal passages for at least three days afterwards. There are no words to describe the smell.

7)  Once the feathers loosen, lay the limp body on a picnic table or other flat surface and start plucking. Make sure to get all the “pin feathers” (they look like really big, thick rods from a massive whitehead).

8)  With a hand-held flame, like something you’d use to light the logs in a romantic fireplace, singe all the hair off the skin of the now bald chicken. Also, again, try not to breathe, as the stench  will leave a mark in your nose. Yes, chickens have hair.

9)  Now the chicken is ready to be gutted. Grab your sharpest knife, make a U-shaped slice following the baseline of the ribcage. Scoop out all the guts* into a bucket. If someone in the family likes the heart, save it in a bowl of cold water. On the same note, if someone has a sweet-tooth for the gizzard, save that too. Just make sure to cut it open and safely remove the corn sac, discard. *Ensure not to cut the bile sac/duct, green goo will run out and spoil the meat.

10)  Rinse the carcass in cold water three times.

Congratulations. After cooking using the method of your own choosing, you are now ready to dine on your newly butchered bird.

Yummy!

Footnote: I do not have a backyard and am not currently considering a return to the Cleaning the Chickens ritual unless vegetables and legumes are banned for consumption in the the US.