THE FRENCH WAY VERSUS THE AMERICAN.
In Paris one eats the best chicken in the world; in New York, as a rule, the worst. How do they do it in France? The answer will be given in the chapter on French Gastronomic Supremacy; here let us anticipate only a few details as supplied to the Government of the United States by Newton B. Ashby, special agent of the Bureau of Animal Industry and published in its Sixteenth Annual Report (1899).
The French, he notes, "are economic people, and the system of sending young and immature chickens to market is not practised. The fowls sent to market are from 4 to 8 months old. They are carefully fed and grown for market instead of being allowed to scavenge. For instance, the chickens are given clean water instead of being allowed the run of filthy pools and puddles."
The method of slaughter, he goes on to say, "seems to be chiefly by cutting the jugular vein. The fowl is then dry plucked very carefully to prevent tearing the flesh, and is drawn through the vent."
How they do it in France?
Note those last six words. They show that the French do not allow chickens to remain undrawn even one day; for, as Mr. Ashby continues, "the fowls are packed the afternoon or evening of the day of slaughter, and despatched to Paris by special express train that night. They are due in Paris before five o'clock in the morning. They are delivered at once to the market, and are sold on the day of arrival, so that French fowls are generally disposed of in the market within twenty to twenty-four hours after being killed.... In July and August many French fowls come to the market alive."
"The Paris markets, and French markets generally," we are further told, "do not take kindly to foreign poultry or meat." Such poultry would of course have to be brought in cold storage, and what the nation which knows most about eating wants is fresh chicken. "Foreign poultry is not in demand in Paris," because the French know and have known for generations that to freeze meat is to spoil it. On this subject I shall have some further remarks in a later section on the Roast Beef of Old England.
Now look at the way much of the poultry consumed in American cities is gathered. Dr. Cavana of Oneida, N. Y., who found no fewer than eleven distinct groups of bacteria in the flesh of a single undrawn fowl, remarked, in a lecture delivered in 1906, at the Annual Convention of Railway Surgeons, that poultry stocks are collected for eastern cities from all parts of the country. He goes on to say that after slaughter the feathers are removed and the carcasses packed in barrels, generally without further dressing. The head, feet, and legs, as well as the craw of partially digested food, therefore, is left in the sealed cavities of the fowls, forming conditions which force the general infection of the tissues by the flagellated, or rapidly swimming intestinal bacteria, which double their quantity and numbers every forty minutes, a single bacillus being capable of developing over forty-two billion germs in twenty-four hours. Their shipments are made by rail and steamship, and cover transit periods of several days before reaching the cold atmospheres of the storage warehouses.
"To determine the activity of these germs and the period required for their permeation of the tissues in the slaughtered undrawn fowl, we caused to be made a series of experiments, the results of which justify the belief that a great percentage of the infected poultry and game stock in storage became so infected before reaching the low temperature of the storage warehouses."
Nor does ordinary cold storage destroy the noisome bacteria. They are merely scotched, to revive and multiply at the first opportunity.