Back in the day, when we lived on the farm, if I wanted to prepare a Sunday chicken dinner, there was a lot of prep work to do. We only did this if we had company coming. We couldn’t go to Food City and select a package of chicken parts from the meat counter. Nope! Na! Na! No way! In fact, in those days the only chicken I might find at the meat market was a sorry looking whole chicken. Separately packaged breasts or drumsticks were far in the future. I prepped my own.

First, I would put over a kettle of water to boil on our kerosene kitchen range. You’ve never seen a kerosene kitchen range? You’re not missing much. They were smoky and reeked of that awful kerosene smell. Before lighting a burner, you made sure the kerosene tank was filled. There was nothing worse than running out of kerosene part way through cooking supper. Why kerosene? It was all we had. This was after the wood burning range days.

Then hatchet in hand, I would head for the chicken coop to select my chicken. That wasn’t hard to do. I would look for one that had stopped laying eggs. How would I know that? Easy. I would lay two fingers under her tail. If the separation of the bones was narrow, she had stopped laying. Time to recycle.

Next, I carried her out to the chopping block. Have you ever killed a chicken? There is a trick to it. First, grab her by her feet and twirl her around several times. While she is still dizzy and unable to struggle, lay her head on the block and quickly chop it off with your hatchet. If you hit her square on the neck, the head will separate nicely and you can toss her body in the grass to drain out the blood. If this seems a bit barbaric, it’s over quickly. Pick her up by her feet and head for the house.

By this time the water should be boiling. Holding her feet, dip her a couple of times into the boiling water. Then carefully lay her on newspapers spread out on the kitchen table. Start plucking away. When all the feathers are gone, rub her skin with a bar of soap. Why? Well, remember these were free range chickens. They picked up dirt and bugs in their everyday meanderings. Scrub them off. Pull out any pin feathers with tweezers. Rinse and you are ready to survey her insides.

Make an incision just above her egg hole and carefully pull out as much innards as you can. Cut around the anus and lay that mess aside. If you are going to fry chicken parts, cut into sections. You will have two breast parts, two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, one bony lower back and one bony upper rib cage. Separate the neck and discard the skin. (You probably were unable to get all the feathers off the neck skin anyway.) Put the parts in a bowl of salted water and set aside.

Now, separate the liver, heart and gizzard from the messy stuff. Carefully cut the gizzard halfway through, being careful not to cut into the inner membrane. Remove that and place with the feathers. Remove the gall bladder from the liver and trim the heart. Add the gizzard, liver and heart to the chicken parts soaking in the salt water. You are now ready to fry chicken.
Fold up the newspaper over the discarded parts and take out to the burning barrel in the back yard. We didn’t have garbage service back in those days. All trash was burned. The resulting ashes, plus bottles and cans, were hauled off to the nearby dump by the side of the road. I don’t remember ever seeing a legal garbage dump.