
The
Smithsonian has the full 10,000 year history of the chicken -
and it's definitely not a dull read. The article is full of
intriguing tidbits such as: "A generation of Britons is
coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the
national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with
Kentucky Fried Chicken."
Or there's this sad story of how a chicken was revealed to be a
fraud: "A chicken bred for the demands of American
supermarket shoppers presumably has lost whatever magical powers
the breed once possessed. Western aid workers discovered this in
Mali during a failed attempt to replace the scrawny native birds
with imported Rhode Island Reds. According to tradition, the
villagers divine the future by cutting the throat of a hen and then
waiting to see in which direction the dying bird falls-left or
right indicates a favorable response to the diviner's question;
straight forward means "no." But the Rhode Island Red, weighted
down by its disproportionately large breast, always fell straight
forward, signifying nothing meaningful except the imminence of
dinner."
Read more here to answer
this question: "[Chickens] provide - along with
omelets, casseroles, fricassees, McNuggets and chicken-liver pâté -
an answer to the question that every 6-year-old boy, visiting a
natural history museum for the first time, has asked his parents:
"What did a dinosaur taste like?"
And as a reward for the correct answer, here are the
results from our library of a search of online chicken recipes with
the highest "buzz."