A chickens got what?

When my husband and I returned from our honeymoon and was settling into the life he never promised me, it was necessary to do our grocery shopping. Those were the days you couldn’t run into the McDonald’s or Burger King for a fast hamburger; you really had to go home after a hard day at work and cook something.

We made our way to the A & P Grocery store four blocks, more or less, from our home. As we carefully walked the aisles of the store, watching the pennies we had to spend for the weeks’ groceries, we stopped at the meat counter. I picked up a package of meat, looked at it in total amazement and said to my husband, “A chickens got what? Look, this package says ‘chicken breast’. A chicken doesn’t have breast!”

I grew up on the farm and OUR chickens didn’t have breast. They only had backs!” He would try to persuade me to put the package of ‘funny meat’ back saying it wasn’t any good. I wouldn’t like it. But I was intrigued. I had to have it, so I bought it over protests from him. He preferred the red meat called roasts.

A little background on the two of us: He grew up in a minister’s family; I grew up a poor girl on a farm. He and his family ate their meals every Sunday with some of the families in the community; we struggled to feed a family of four children and two adults living off the land. Every Sunday the people in the community where he lived would serve them chicken along with all the good vegetables from their gardens. Yeah, pretty much every Sunday. Back to my family: We only had chicken when we had the preacher and his family over for dinner. Chicken was a luxury to us, not just another weekly meal.

When we had the pastor and his family, our chicken became the ‘sacrificial lamb’. We didn’t have that many chickens so each one we killed for the pastor was one less we had on the farm. That, and we were bonded to those chickens. Sometimes they had names. We fed those babies every morning with leftover cornbread and biscuit scraps.

I had to listen to him as he complained about how ‘they had to eat old chicken every Sunday.’ He had to listen to me as I complained because 'I never got to eat a part of the chicken that wasn’t the backbone.'

He probably was able to sit at the dining table with his family. I had to eat in the kitchen most times, alone, because the bigger kids got to eat at the dining table, and either I couldn’t be trusted with what I might say or did say, or there wasn’t room. Most likely it was the first thing mentioned and not the latter, but for whatever reason I was assigned the kitchen and Mama always gave me the backbone. (Had I been seated at the big table I probably would have questioned why everybody else got the good parts of the chicken, and I got stuck with those backbones. My mother knew her child and any injustices I might have felt would have been brought up anywhere, in front of anybody.) Anyway, that is why I have questioned that chicken had anything but backbones.

My husband’s attitude towards chicken always bothered me once I learned how unappreciative he was of what those families gave up for them to properly feed their pastor and his family on Sundays. Those chickens DIED for him and he never appreciated it one bit. Now if he had had to eat the backbones I could understand his resentment, but no, he got the good pieces. He did recognize that chicken breast in the grocery store, remember?

I’m still not over it. But I get my revenge now. As long as I cook the meals I can have chicken as often as I want. I just can't fry it like my Mama could. Hubby does now have the option of going to Burger King or McDonald’s or some other place, but most of the time he’s just too lazy, so he’ll eat chicken. He still has an awful pained look on his face, but he’ll tolerate it.

Now I’m glad to know that chickens really do have other parts. I’ve learned to like the wings and the drumstick as well as the breasts.

*Disclaimer: this may not have been exactly how it went down in the grocery store, but it's pretty close. The rest of the story is pretty accurate. I really did know what a chicken breast was. I wasn’t that much of a hayseed that I didn’t know there were other parts of the chicken. I remember times my brother and I would fight over the pulley bone, (That's at the top of the chicken where the breast pieces join) and he would always make me snap mine off short, so he’d have good luck and not me. I’m sure he was lucky enough to eat that piece of meat on the pulley bone, too. Yeah, we would fight over chicken in my house!

I’m pretty sure that trip to the grocery store was the first I learned about his true attitude about chicken. If I had known it a week earlier, I probably wouldn’t have gone through those marriage vows. That’s a pretty big cultureal divide between two people. I mean, how can anybody who grows up in a preacher’s family not be appreciative of families who gave up their chickens so they could eat?

We didn’t go to the grocery store for our meats like they did. No, no, I’m sorry they didn’t either. The neighbors also kept them in meat during hog-killing days. That’s probably another reason he and his dad never cared that much for pork.

As an afterthought, the backbones of a chicken don’t have much meat on them, but if the bone is floured up and fried real good, you don’t always miss the meat. It just all tastes like….chicken?