City Chicken: The Real, True History from What I Can Tell

The past few weeks, I’ve been lost in a mindweb, orbiting around the words “City Chicken.” Imagine Tom Cruise in Minority Report, feverishly moving around pictures of chickens and pigs, pages of old cookbooks, then just pausing to stare at pictures of fried meat, and murmuring under my breath “…why?!”

“It is described as breaded [meat] on a skewer, browned & baked.  It can be described as a mock drum stick.” says Carolyn Wietrzykowski. Her restaurant The Polish Village Cafe in Hamtramck, MI has been serving the same recipe for City Chicken for over 40 years.

Carolyn’s version is entirely made from pieces of pork, but you’ll often find City Chicken containing beef or veal as well. But you’ll never find recipes for it containing chicken.

City Chicken hails as a Polish-American, rustbelt classic that boomed to popularity during The Great Depression. Pittsburgh has all but claimed the dish, though recipes for it have emerged in cities in the Midwest, such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Youngstown, OH.

The delicious recipe I received for it came from the family of Amelia Machingo, born in Youngstown, Ohio. Her recipe was published in her community’s cookbook, and has been a family staple for decades. I’m honored to have had the chance to recreate the dish, and post the recipe for people to try themselves.

Click here for Amelia’s City Chicken Recipe

The prevailing line of thought for why City Chicken exists is that chicken was hard to come by during the Great Depression, so resourceful cooks made do with scraps of beef and pork. The hard time I’ve been having with this is that City Chicken (in name and components) clearly existed before the Depression, and chicken also doesn’t appear to have been that hard to come by during the Depression (or at least, not extraordinarily more difficult than most commodities were during the Depression.)

So…I decided I needed to investigate it and see if I could crack open the reason why it’s called “City Chicken.” Did I do it?

Spoiler: maybe?

City Chicken: The Early Years

A similar dish appears to have existed for a few decades as “Mock Chicken” before picking up the moniker “City Chicken” in the 1920s. Mock poultry dishes were common around the turn of the century, and were considered pretty fancy for awhile. They all center around the same idea: using other meats to imitate poultry (and often the drumstick part).

Here’s a recipe from my Household Discoveries & Mrs. Curtis’ Cookbook for Mock Duck (though, truth be told, it sounds more like braciole than it does any duck I’ve ever eaten.)

The earliest recipe I’ve seen for Mock Chicken is this from a 1908 Kentucky newspaper.

Oddly enough, at the point that recipes for veal and pork-laden Mock Chicken were getting popular, chicken was becoming a more accessible meat to city dwellers (I’ll explain this in a sec). Why didn’t they start making City Chicken with chicken? Was it all some kind of sick joke to them? (I have considered the possibility that calling it “City Chicken” was done so sardonically, but have found no proof.)

Everyone is Wrong About Chicken During the Depression

While researching this, I kept hitting the same wall. I kept reading that chicken was scarce during the Depression, hence people made fake drumsticks from pork and veal. This didn’t seem to check out. If anything, chicken production was on the rise right before the Depression. It would make sense that people would have started making City Chicken with actual chicken!

To get started, here’s what was happening with chicken:

Prior to the 1920s, chicken-as-meat was common in the country, but not as much in the city. Farmers would make more money selling eggs than whole chickens, and usually saved the chicken meat for supper. They were restricted to selling any surplus chicken meat seasonally.

(if you’re curious, here’s a good chicken-farming timeline I’ve gleaned some info from.)

But with the help of new technology, farmers were able to expand their chicken operations. In the 1918 edition of Fannie Farmer, she notes that “Since incubators have been so much used for hatching chickens, small birds suitable for broiling may be always found in market.” This new seasonal convenience was met with a relatively reasonable price. My 1914 copy of Household Discoveries & Mrs. Curtis’ Cookbook quotes the price at 20 cents a pound, comparable to tougher cuts of beef and wildly cheaper than filet mignon (90 cents a pound.)

In the 1920s, the trend of affordable, accessible chicken blasted forward with the advent of large-scale chicken farming. Mrs. Wilmer Steele of Delaware is credited with opening the first factory chicken farm in 1923, with 500 broilers. She was met with such success, that by 1926 she housed 10,000 broilers. (Here’s a wild fact: after selling her successful business at a profit, she and her husband died in a freak yachting accident. Yikes!)

So, chicken was becoming cheap. People were experiencing a national financial crisis and needed cheap food. Why did a pork & veal dish imitating chicken become popular?

What Happened to City Chicken During the Great Depression

I realized that in trying to crack the case on City Chicken, I was making the mistake of looking at chicken prices. What I needed to look at was what was happening to pork and beef.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, farmers panicked. In their fear of going under, they increased the number of crops and herds. The need for meat did not increase, however, and this surplus caused such a decrease in value, that the federal government introduced the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) in the hopes of creating scarcity.

The initial method for increasing scarcity were for the government to buy crops and herds from farmers at a premium, and plow them underground. In a country of people standing in bread lines to feed their family, getting word of viable food being plowed under was not received well. An estimated 6.4 million pigs were killed, causing public outcry.

In 1935 there was an amendment to the act, and the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation was founded. The federal government would now purchase the commodities from the farmers, and distribute them to relief agencies, so the food could go to impoverished families in need of food. These commodities were primarily wheat, milk and pork then later on rye, flax, sugar cane and beef were added. And, allegedly, the lion’s share of the 6.4 million hogs that caused the public outcry managed to find their way to relief agencies. Is it truth? Who knows.

So, during the Great Depression, it’s not that chicken became so expensive – it’s that pork and beef became so cheap. Too cheap, in fact, so then they were given away to hungry people who needed to find tasty ways to cook all of it.

Here’s a recipe from 1936, during the probable height of City Chicken’s popularity. In this instance, it managed to cross the road all the way to Nebraska!

I have zero regrets regarding that cross the road joke, by the way. I feel good.

Who was/is eating City Chicken?

City Chicken doesn’t enjoy the popularity it used to. It doesn’t get splashed around on Bon Appetit, and there isn’t a popular cookbook coming out this year called “A Year in Sticks: 365 City Chicken Recipes.” (or, at least, not yet.)

But it’s still easy enough to find City Chicken in family homes, or restaurants specializing in homey meals and nostalgic treats, especially if you’re in the right area of the country.

City Chicken is claimed as a Polish American classic, of which Pittsburgh, PA is ground zero. From there it has spread to nearby Youngstown (which is where this recipe is from), Cleveland and then Detroit. I haven’t found evidence for it in Chicago yet, spawning my grand theory of “The Great Midwestern City Chicken Wall” through which no City Chicken may pass.

All of these rustbelt cities have a high Eastern European population. You’ll find City Chicken in mid-scale, homey restaurants specializing in Polish cuisine. According to this Eater article, chef Michael Symon has attempted to sell City Chicken as an upscale dish at his restaurant Lola in Cleveland, but with little success. It eventually came off the menu.

At the Polish Village Cafe in Hamtramck, MI, it remains steadily popular, even though it does sometimes require an explanation to customers. Hamtramck is right outside Detroit, and is the hotbed for Polish-American culture in southeastern Michigan.

I had the chance to ask Carolyn, the manage of Polish Village Cafe, a few questions, so I asked her why she thought City Chicken came to be. Turns out she and I had been in the same mindweb.

“There’s little evidence that chicken was harder to come by than pork.” She told me. “Although…. there are only 2 drum sticks. (Everyone’s favorite). Perhaps it was invented to fill that shortage. “

I think that theory has some teeth. Chickens were only sold whole at the time, and it wouldn’t be practical to buy 5 chickens so your family could enjoy a meal of only drumsticks. At that rate, it would be easier to fabricate them yourself…and maybe you would do it…OUT OF PORK.

Despite being billed as a Polish classic and it’s continued popularity in Eastern European communities, City Chicken doesn’t appear to have sailed across the ocean with the Polish-American community. We Americans started putting beef and pork on sticks and calling it chicken all on our own…and darn proud of it, too.

All-American Meat Sticks

What City Chicken manages to do is tell the story of American Protein Consumption and how it changed during the 20th Century. Like a quirky and unreliable narrator, City Chicken talks us through housewife culture and recipe collecting, then the advent of factory farming at the beginning of the 20th century. It rambles on to tell us about The Great Depression and it’s effect on farmers and the working class’s protein choices. After which, it simultaneously hits the mainstream as its origin fade into obscurity, while the United States enjoys (for better and also worse) the most affordable and accessible meat they’ve ever had.

Check out Amelia’s recipe for City Chicken here, and give it a try. Fire up the mashed potatoes and make some gravy from the drippings. Enjoy!