This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of those fancy cloth-napkin restaurants you go to for anniversaries? If you decided it's best not to ask, this story is not for you.
Come with me aboard a Minnesota Packet Company steamboat bound from Galena upriver to St. Paul. It’s 1867, dinnertime, and some 300 cabin passengers have taken their places in the elegant dining room on second deck, each place set with crystal, china, and silverware. An astonishing array of meats and vegetables in exotic sauces tempt the diners to try a little of everything. Most of the passengers have never eaten so well even in the fanciest of hotels out east.
It is likely that a few of the passengers were not hungry this day—the ones who had wandered two hours earlier onto the lower deck by the boiler, where this fancy meal began. Here the chickens are being prepared. As with all the food served on steamboats, the chicken was as fresh as possible; it was alive. Coops of chickens sat waiting while the cook drew a huge vat of scalding water from the boilers. One by one, the head dresser grabs a chicken by the head, swings its neck across the rim the vat. The chicken goes into the water, the head overboard into the river. Three pluckers pick up the scalded chickens and pull off the feathers. The pin-feather men then singe the chicken over a charcoal grill to remove most pin feathers, and the chicken is then turned over to an undercook who guts and cuts up the chicken for frying. Soon the chicken is dead enough, the cooks said, to stay on the platter and head for the grand dining room.
The best of the cook’s crews could dress 150 chickens an hour—enough for all 300 passengers. On those rare occasions when food ran short, the cook had an easy solution: increase the number of passengers allowed to watch the food being prepared.
Maybe there's a new weight-loss idea here. If you had to personally wring the neck of every chicken you ate, the percentage of grains and legumes in your diet might rise.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
