Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (17 page)

The complex included feeding stations, laying sheds, winter housing, and a veterinary clinic as well as several yards and small fields, all interspersed with lawns and gravel paths. Stately elms sheltered the yards from winter winds. “In cultivating the homely recreations of a farm, her Majesty has exhibited great industry and much good taste,” the reporter concluded. The morning the article was published, Victoria and Albert were again at the complex admiring “some of the Poultry, which are really very fine & fat,” the queen noted.

The same week, Londoners were busy snatching up copies of Charles Dickens's new novella
A Christmas Carol
, written to underscore the terrible conditions faced by London's working class amid the Industrial Revolution. In the story, even the hard-pressed Cratchits manage to buy a small goose for the traditional centerpiece of the English holiday meal. The fowl of choice that the reformed Scrooge orders from the poulterer is the prize turkey. But it was
chicken rather than goose or turkey that was the talk of the 1843 Christmas table at Windsor. Guests were treated to “Cochin China pullets, which had been reared and fattened at the royal aviary in the Home Park,” according to a newspaper account. “The Cochin China pullets weighed between six and seven pounds,” two or three times the weight of a typical English chicken.

Soon the exotic fowls and their progeny were distributed to other royals around Europe. The following spring, after Victoria and Albert's uncle King Leopold of Belgium visited the aviary, eggs from the “more rare and curious” fowl from Asia were packaged and shipped to Brussels. By the summer of 1844, Victoria wrote that the complex was “really beautiful now, much enlarged with a terrace & fountain & a room is being built for us.” In the small apartment, they could take tea and watch the birds with a view of the splashing fountain. They hosted the French king Louis-Philippe, whose favorite dish was chicken and rice, at the aviary that fall. Mainly, however, this was a private place for the couple to spend time “feeding our very tame poultry,” as Victoria noted in her diary.

The young couple's fascination with fowl began to attract public attention and encourage imitation. The author of the 1844 book
Farming for Ladies; Or, a Guide to the Poultry-Yard, the Dairy and Piggery
saw the aviary firsthand, and concluded that the royal interest was for the moment purely amusement. But the writer adds that the long-term goal was to establish a poultry yard to supply the royal kitchens on a regular basis. “Nor can there be a doubt that the introduction of foreign breeds will thus—under the example of her gracious patronage—in the course of time, cause much improvement in the stock of our native species.” Chicken, after all, was too expensive for most commoners, states the writer. “In London, the common prices of poultry are generally so high, that people of narrow income, if living in town, can seldom afford to put any on their table.”

Chickens were already in Britain when Caesar arrived with his troops in 55 BC. The general noted the peculiar fact that it was against the
law to eat them. Instead, he observed, the natives raised them “for their own amusement and pleasure,” which suggested that they were used for both religious and gambling purposes. The Romans brought their own varieties of fowl across the English Channel, including one with an extra toe that is today called the Dorking, for roasting as well as for augury, cockfighting, and ritual sacrifice. Roman men carried the right foot of a chicken for good luck and ate rooster testicles to enhance their virility.

The oldest handwritten documents in Great Britain are the Vindolanda tablets found near Hadrian's Wall, which two centuries after Caesar's invasion separated Roman Britain from the Celtic Picts in what is now Scotland. Among these wooden boards is a shopping list given by a commanding officer of a garrison to his slave. The man was sent to a local market to purchase twenty chickens and “if you can find nice ones, a hundred or two hundred eggs, if they are for sale there at a fair price.” The Latin saying “from the egg to the apples”—equivalent to our English “from soup to nuts”—described the Roman passion for starting a meal with an egg dish, and Roman bakers were perhaps the first to make custards and cakes using the hen ovum. Where there were Romans, there were chickens. And in Roman Britain, some people were even buried with the bird.

Chicken-and-egg eating declined after the Romans abandoned the island in the fifth century AD, but rebounded with the growth of monasteries in the early Middle Ages. The sixth-century AD Rule of Benedict forbids monks from eating the meat of four-legged animals, so fowl and their eggs emerged as an important commodity. Ducks and geese grew larger and fatter and made bigger eggs, but about half of medieval England's poultry were chickens. Most manor houses and monasteries kept at least a small flock. In times of famine from poor harvests or cattle disease, the chicken was the handy backup. It was, the food scholar C. Anne Wilson says, “the poor man's bird in medieval times.”

Until Shakespeare's day, chicken was cheap. You could buy a whole bird for three or four pence, a pittance even then. It was, however, just one of many options. There were quail, bustards, herons,
finches, wood pigeons, gulls, egrets, thrushes, mallards, and snipes. In thirteenth-century London, you could walk into a cookshop, put down eighteen pence—still a modest sum—and walk out with an entire roast heron. But as the human population grew and farmland expanded, wild birds became scarce and farmers began to raise large herds of pigs and cattle. Goose, pork, and beef became the flesh of choice. One historian calculates that, by 1400, chicken accounted for only 10 percent of what people spent on meat in eastern England. “Whoever could afford, substituted chickens with either goose or red meat,” writes the Yale historian Philip Slavin. By this time, he adds, chickens were “a relatively minor contribution” to the late-medieval farm economy.

Swans and pheasant, by contrast, were strictly reserved for royalty. At Henry VI's 1429 coronation dinner in London, peacock was served as well. There were, fortunately, several other courses, since the colorful bird is infamously inedible. (The trend continued among the elite, and savvy Victorian diners knew to avoid the splendid peacock on the buffet.) Turkeys from the New World and guinea fowl from Africa arrived by the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, doves were the rage, since they contributed to national security as well as to dinner tables. Besides providing delicious meat, their nitrogen-rich droppings extracted from dovecotes were an essential element in the manufacture of the gunpowder required for Britain's growing navy and army. Chickens and their eggs remained low on the culinary totem pole. Their profits, sniffed one agricultural handbook from the early 1800s, were “too inconsiderable to enter into the calculations of the farmer.” Real farmers—that is, men—raised sheep and cattle.

In 1801, Parliament passed an act encouraging landowners to fence their land. The push for privatization had the effect of raising rents. In the decades that followed, poor and landless farmers decamped to the growing cities and burgeoning factories. In 1825, London's population of 1.35 million surpassed that of Beijing, which for more than a century was the world's largest metropolis. Food prices edged up. The British cleric and statistician Thomas Robert Malthus
warned that disaster loomed. Less food and more people meant that “the poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress.” Ultimately, he argued, the only way the population would stay within the limits of the food supply would be through a combination of starvation, war, disease, birth control, and celibacy.

Today, demographers know that, as societies industrialize, birth rates spike as people leave the land for cities. But as incomes increase and women marry later and gain access to education, those birth rates steadily decline. Public health measures decrease infant mortality and infectious disease, technological innovations increase the food supply, and new transportation systems distribute that food more widely. This was as true for Victorian England as it was for early-twentieth-century America and twenty-first-century China. But in Victorian England, no one knew this. Malthus's grim warning appeared to be coming true as millions crammed into slums rife with disease and hunger, conditions that Charles Dickens was busy chronicling. Revolution, chaos, or apocalypse seemed nigh.

As Captain Belcher arrived back in Britain in the summer of 1842, a half-million workers in Britain were on strike protesting wage cuts as prices for basic staples rose. Supplying adequate and affordable food was essential to stave off revolution and keep Britain's new factories churning out finished goods to sell across its empire. Prince Albert emerged as a leading advocate of improving the country's dire food situation through the use of new technology. One of his tutors, Adolphe Quetelet, had been a colleague of Malthus's, and Albert was the royal patron of the statistical society that Malthus and Quetelet helped found. The prince encouraged the queen's interest in animals that might have practical benefits for his adopted country. “Agriculture needs encouragement from the Crown,” he writes in a condescending note to his father, “which V. naturally cannot give.”

The transformation of British agriculture was already apparent at Leadenhall Market, a huge stone building that sat on top of the Roman basilica and forum of ancient Londinium, where vendors two millennia earlier hawked live chickens. Today, it is an upscale mall, but in
the fourteenth century it emerged as the center of the country's poultry industry. Gaggles of honking geese were herded through the city's streets from outlying farms and ships docked at the nearby Thames to unload French eggs. By the 1840s Leadenhall was the world's single largest poultry market, selling two-thirds of the city's fowl, including geese, ducks, turkeys, pigeons, and game fowl, as well as chickens. But the market's famous chaos, filth, and noise were largely gone. Thanks to the new railroads—Victoria and Albert took their first train trip a few months before their exotic chickens arrived—the animals could be slaughtered on a distant farm and then brought to the capital while still fresh. It was a radical innovation, given the difficulty and expense involved in shipping, storing, and tending to live ones. Refrigeration still lay in the future, but this change marked a big step toward the plastic-wrapped meats of today's supermarkets.

British farms could not begin to supply the 4 million birds that Leadenhall and other London markets sold each year in that era, or the enormous number of eggs demanded by Londoners. Most poultry was brought by ship from Ireland, Holland, Belgium, and particularly France, where the industry had long been more highly developed. The “three French hens” bestowed in “The Twelve Days of Christmas”
is a reminder of the age-old English dependence on French poultry. As Britain's population soared, so did the imports. Britons ate about 60 million foreign eggs in 1830 and more than 90 million by 1842. Eggs were also used to soften leather; one factory alone bought eighty thousand eggs a year to produce kid gloves. The British reliance on foreign nations for such a basic foodstuff worried Albert.

As the Windsor aviary neared completion in 1843, the royal couple appointed a full-time royal poultry keeper named James Walter, praised by the
Illustrated London News
as the chickens' “vigilant guardian” who “understands their language, their dispositions, their diseases.” A large drawing shows him covered in a dozen adoring pigeons, two of which are vying for a perch on his top hat. He immediately began to conduct breeding experiments to see if the ­Dorking chicken, the variety likely brought by Caesar's troops, could be crossed with the Asian ostrich fowl.

“In order to improve the breed of the genuine Dorking fowl, that it should be crossed with that of the Cochin China fowl, the necessary arrangements were made,” the
Berkshire Chronicle
reports on September 28, 1844:

“A Dorking hen, which has been roosted for some time past with the fowls from China, has recently been in the habit of laying twice, and sometimes thrice a week, eggs containing double or two distinct yolks. Mr. Walters [
sic
], determined to try the experiment of attempting to hatch one of these double-yolk eggs, placed it, with several other eggs, under the hen. The result was that two chickens were produced from this single egg; one is a cock bird of the pure Cochin China breed, and the other is a hen chick of the Dorking species, both of which are now five days old and in good health.”

The publicity surrounding the royal chickens began to attract widespread interest. London's first poultry show took place at the zoo in Regent's Park on June 14, 1845, three years after Victoria visited the orangutan. The modest affair was something of a novelty; the first major dog show in London wouldn't take place for more than three decades. Agricultural exhibitions were mostly designed for farmers rather than animal enthusiasts; pets were largely an upper-class luxury. Participants walked past the bear pit at the back of the garden, and there was no tent to shield exhibitors from the unusually damp weather afflicting Britain that season. There were only a dozen varieties of chicken, including some from Spain and the Madeiras, at least one said to be from China, and one from Malaysia. Most entrants were, however, domestic birds, and a speckled Dorking won first prize.