City Chicken a Polish-American Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is Polish city chicken made of? ›

Traditionally, city chicken consists of cubes of pork, veal, or both, which are threaded onto skewers, battered with flour and breadcrumbs, and baked or deep-fried to tender perfection. Cooks often shape the skewered meat to mimic chicken drumsticks, and the dish indeed tastes like 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.

It was a working-class food item. During the Depression, cooks used pork or in many cases veal because it was then cheaper than chicken in many cities, especially meat packing centers such as Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, and Pittsburgh where such cuts were more readily available than chicken.

First mentioned in 1908, mock chicken is a mixture of coarsely chopped pork and veal shaped to resemble chicken legs or cubes of pork and veal arranged on skewers, seasoned and cooked like chicken.

Pork accounts for the largest share of meat consumption in Poland and is also the most commonly used for meat products. Thanks to its universality, pork is used in a variety of dishes, and the culinary tradition of Poles further favours its consumption.

City chicken is a skewer of pork cubes that are breaded, deep-fried, and then baked to resemble fried chicken. I like to use all pork, but the tradition is to use pork and veal combined.

It's usually pork, sometimes veal, sometimes both, but never chicken. The second crazy fact—one that will blow the mind of anyone who has been to the butcher or supermarket in the last thirty years—is that City Chicken came to be because pork and veal were once much cheaper than chicken.

A Pittsburgh rare steak is one that has been heated to a very high temperature very quickly, so it is charred on the outside but still rare or raw on the inside. The degree of rareness and the amount of charring on the outside may vary according to taste.

City chicken is a dish that came to life thanks to Polish and Ukrainian communities who settled in the Great Lakes region at the start of the Great Depression.

Lobsters were considered the “poor man's chicken” and primarily used for fertilizer or fed to prisoners and slaves. Some indentures servants even revolted against being forced to eat the meat and the colony agreed that they would not be fed lobster meat more than three times a week.

What is meat on a stick called? ›

In English, kebab, or in North America also kabob, often occurring as shish kebab, is now a culinary term for small pieces of meat cooked on a skewer.

Beggar's Chicken used to be a dish for the poor. Legend has it that the dish was invented when a beggar stole a chicken. Because he had no pot to cook it in, the beggar supposedly wrapped the chicken in lotus leaves and packed it in mud before lighting a fire in the ground and burying it.

It tastes like chicken, although the exact flavour varies between brands and what type of product it is. Generally, like animal-based chicken, vegan chicken doesn't have a strong flavour on its own, and will often be seasoned.

Description. Vegetarian mock chicken is a wheat-based meat alternative that's fried and ready to eat. Made from wheat flour, the fried gluten is seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and soybean oil to create an umami flavour and chewy texture, similar to that of chicken.

City dwellers longed for chicken, that fancy delicious bird that only farmers got to eat, the lucky devils. But the elusive fowl were raised in the country, and were hard to obtain in the city and expensive when found. So city mice fashioned a pork-veal dish as a sort of mock chicken.

The Polish is mainly an ornamental bird, however, at one time they were use for their eggs, but when the Leghorn became popular they were no longer widely used for egg production. The Polish are very prolific, laying around 200 or more eggs.

If you're in the chicken business strictly for eggs and meat, they really aren't the best choice, probably. However, if you're in it for the fun, beautiful yard decorations, and birds' personalities, these are your chickens!