Zimmermann Poultry Store

says here they dressed them for you

My mom told me that HER mom plucked chickens, but MY mom never did.

As a kid I worked in a farm market that also sold rotisserie chickens. Each day I had to set up the chickens on the skewer but not before burning off the pin feathers with a blow torch. Will never forget the stench.

Isn't it ironic that after you plucked off the feathers you had to "dress" it!!

Yes, I remember my mom plucking the feathers. I remember my uncle chopping the head off of a chicken, he had a chopping block. I remember my mom taking the plucked chicken and putting over a hot flame to singe of the pins that were left after plucking.

When I was a kid, my mom and I would walk about 6 blocks and catch the bus to town (she never did learn to drive) to shop at the butcher/deli shop, pick up shoes at the cobbler's or get sewing needs at the fabric store, and go Woolworth's Five & Dime where we'd stop for tea at the lunch counter before heading for the bus home.

The whole chickens we got were plucked, but not as cleanly as the ones in the supermarkets now. My mom always had to do some plucking of missed feathers and used a match to burn off the tiny pin feathers.

But my mom was raised on a farm, so she wasn't bothered by that or the stuff in the butcher's case...goat's heads with the eyeballs in them, huge beef tongues, shiny pink brains, honeycombed sheets of tripe, slabs of deep red liver, and beef hearts, etc. I, on the other hand, really disliked all that "gore" in the meat case.

Fortunately, my dad was not really into that sort of stuff (even though his own grandfather was a traveling butcher in Italy and my dad, as a kid, sometimes rode on the donkey cart with his grandfather to the outlying farms), so beef liver, sometimes tripe in a spaghetti sauce, and chicken livers were the only gross stuff in our meals besides the usual pork or lamb chops, ground beef, roasts, and so on. I still cannot...and will not...eat anything from inside an animal. I don't eat veal or lamb either, and not even beef anymore though I'm not a total vegetarian.

The toughest thing about dressing it is trying to get the wings thru the little arms of the jacket, hahaha!😊

We raised and killed & dressed our own poultry. Huge vat of hot water to dunk to loosen feathers. What an assembly line!

My mom did the butchering.....chopped off the chicken heads and threw them in a big cardboard box. If she missed the box it would literally run around, blood flying everywhere! I did a lot of screaming as a five year old. 😃

My mom did the butchering.....chopped off the chicken heads and threw them in a big cardboard box. If she missed the box it would literally run around, blood flying everywhere! I did a lot of screaming as a five year old. 😃

Ahh, yes, the butcher shop. Suppressed memories of Duck Blood Soup (a Polish receipe).

Back when chickens were real chickens, not the cell phone toting feathered fiends of today

Mom said when she and her grandma bought it, it'd be wrapped in newspaper with the feet hanging out one end and the head hanging out the other. The store they went to DID have a plucker in the back though. :D

Tijuana chicken