What the heck is City Chicken? A Legendary, Historic Cleveland Regional Dish

If someone mentions City Chicken, you get two responses, either you get the deer-in-the-headlights look, or a mellow dreamy-eyed look and the person mentions remembering their grandma making it and how they loved the dish. It was, and still is, soul food for us 1950s kids. Today, City Chicken has shrunk into the background as something difficult to accumulate ingredients, not to mention it is a multi-step recipe that most don’t have time for these days. But if you want an amazing regional dish, one that kids and adults will all love so much their eyes will roll back in their heads, you should try making City Chicken. And if you remember it from your grandma, this will take you back to your grandmother’s warm savory-scented kitchen. Now don’t get excited about this being a terrific chicken dish, the main thing to know about City Chicken is; there is no chicken in City Chicken! And there never has been. “That can’t be right,” you say. Well, yes, it is. I grew up getting City Chicken a couple times a year and it was something I was excited about eating. I was a picky-eater as a kid but City Chicken night?? Load me up! As a busy young housewife, I only made it once for my family as it was difficult locating veal and veal was expensive when we were young and broke with three food-absorbing kids. And finding the sticks was impossible. Sticks? Yes, this dish has sticks, wooden sticks. I got lucky one day on a visit to a restaurant supply place. I saw a huge commercial package of the necessary wooden skewers that I remembered seeing my mom loading up with cubes of meat. It was a bag of 1000, but I bought them knowing I’d have plenty of the precious sticks for the rest of my life! And now, as intent as I was on introducing the joy of City Chicken to my husband and kids, I had the magical wood sticks to work with. So with a handful of short, stout, wooden skewers I looked up my mom's recipe for City Chicken. My mom had typed up all her favorite and memorable dishes when she was in her 60s so the family and descendants could know her by her recipes and thoughts about them. As a lifelong executive secretary she meticulously put all the recipes into a book and she printed out copies for us. She’s gone now but I refer to her book constantly. So I turned to the City Chicken recipe and studied it. Something was off. I remembered mom putting chicken boullion or broth in the pan and mom's typed recipe had LaChoy's Brown Gravy Sauce in it. I don't think they started making that sauce until the 60's so Mom must have piddled with the original recipe from Grandma. So I had to do some digging. At the time, no one here in the Midwest had ever heard of City Chicken. A few pretended they knew of it then tried to explain to me how it is baked chicken…uh, nope. There’s no chicken in it….ever. I grew up in Cleveland and everyone over the age of sixty remembers City Chicken and we all know there is no chicken involved. So why do they call it City Chicken? Beats me. That’s a bit of trivia I didn’t know, so I asked Mrs Google and she sent me to Mr Wikipedia and sure enough Mr Wikipedia knew a few things about City Chicken. "While preparations regionally vary (Pittsburgh, parts of New York and Canada), pork is typically the base meat used in most versions of the recipe. The Cleveland version is generally baked without breading and instead the meat is dredged in flour, browned in a pan, then finished in the oven, and served with gravy." That is exactly how I remember City Chicken. I don’t know about today, but when I was a kid in Cleveland in the 1950s, City Chicken was always a fifty-fifty mix of pork and veal cubes. So I searched the Cleveland Plain-Dealer newspaper archives for the first mention of City Chicken. It was November 1926. American economics had begun to decline in the middle of 1926 after the Industrial Revolution and the wild “Roaring Twenties”. Food products had begun to cost more and income and jobs started slacking toward the end of 1926. I didn’t study it hard enough to look through grocery sales, but in some of the later articles I found reporters commenting that chicken cost more after WWI because poultry farms were so far from the city. Most folks walked or took a streetcar so getting out to farms for chicken was difficult and expensive, especially since refrigeration was rare. So people resorted to cheaper meats which were cuts of pork and veal and the butchers seems to have a decent supply of both. We don’t hear much about veal these days, such as veal cutlets, but decades ago, veal was the meat of an unborn cow, so technically it is beef. Today veal is baby cow or young cow, or so it is said. Whatever it is, it used to be very tender and a mild flavor. Because it was so mild, people weren’t excited about it so the cost was low to encourage people to buy it. I grew up loving liver and other kids would start to dry-heave if I mentioned it. But my mom always bought calf’s liver, again tender and mild. Mom soaked it in milk all afternoon and I never bothered to ask her why, but a little dusting of flour and fried in an iron skillet with a ton of real butter and sliced onions…it was unbelievably mild, tender and wonderful. But back to City Chicken that everyone loved. It may be that the inventor of City Chicken is mentioned in that 1926 article as Mrs. C. P. Thompson. She is reported as having won second place in an “economic” menu for Thanksgiving day. The main meat dish was City Chicken. I suspect turkey, along with chicken was expensive for the times. Just guessing, I suppose the name City Chicken came from the appearance of the finished dish. Using those wood skewers, cubes of meat were skewed to fill the stick, then fried, then baked. Because my family is mostly German and Polish, I’d have called them Polish Kebabs which may have made more sense, but it was christened City Chicken and the name stuck. Now Mrs Thompson’s recipe was pretty simply written in 1926. You’d have to have some cooking skills a little better than basic to figure it out. It is written: 1926 Take one pound veal steak, 1 pound pork tenderloin. Cut in pieces about 1 ½ inches square. Put alternately a piece of veal, then a piece of pork on wooden skewers that are used for rolled roast, until 6 pieces are used. Roll each chicken in cracker crumbs and beaten egg. Brown well on all sides, season well. Put in roaster, add 2 cups water, cover and bake 3 hours. When done, add a cup of rich milk to make gravy. That’s it! Temperatures, browning, seasoning…a few things are missing by today’s recipe standards. Still fun to imagine this may be the first report on City Chicken and might have been invented by Mrs Thompson. The lady won $3 for her second place entry. Just for fun, the other items on the dinner menu were cream of celery soup, croutons, mashed potatoes, gravy, home-canned relish, baking powder biscuits, cranberry sauce and eggless pumpkin pie. About the only thing I’d recognize as Thanskgiving would be the cranberry sauce. The recipe for eggless pumpkin pie is interesting too, made mostly from milk and crackers. I suppose if chicken was expensive at the time, I’d assume eggs were too, so make pumpkin pie out of milk and crackers was probably a necessity. And we all thought our Covid times were short on food supplies. All we were missing is toilet paper. Perhaps the Plain-Dealer spread the information around as City Chicken cropped up in the Food section of the Plain-Dealer about three years later in June 1929. The recipe was almost identical to the 1926 version, but they upped the weight of the meats to one-and-a-half pounds each. This time there was a list of ingredients and it simply listed only four ingredients; veal, pork, cracker crumbs and a beaten egg. In June of that year people didn’t know what was coming in October 1929 but I’m sure they enjoyed City Chicken until then. City Chicken wasn’t heard from again until May 1931. Someone apparently wrote to the food editor and asked for the recipe but someone had tinkered with the original and doesn’t resemble the original much, but directions are more specific…and bacon?? 1931 ½ lb lean beef, round or chuck 1/3 lb lean pork 1 slice onion 1 egg, beaten Bread Crumbs 6 meat skewers Pound beef and pork well. Cut in inch and a half and two inch cubes. Sterilize meat skewers in boiling water. Place a piece of beef on the skewer, then a square of bacon, then a cube of pork, bacon, and last beef. Shape with fingers. Rub with salt and pepper. Roll in bread crumbs, in beaten egg and again in bread crumbs. Brown on all sides in hot fat. Add the slice of onion, cover the pan and cook in a slow oven one hour. Thanks for that crazy recipe with the bacon interlude. It didn't mention bacon in the ingredients list so maybe it was a surprise. It probably would be good, but I’m a purist, it’s not like the original. Pound the beef? Okay. And I’m assuming “hot fat” is from a can of left over bacon grease everyone had next to their stoves. Tell your grandchildren about that. Once again, City Chicken goes back to the coops and doesn’t show up again until Oct 1933. This recipe is even crazier. It’s just a couple paragraphs explaining that it’s a savory main dish for fall and winter. They include sketchy information on rubbing the meat with salt and pepper, dipping in bread crumbs and egg or just flour or corn meal. Corn meal? The American economy had entered the great depression after the stock market crash of 1929. It lasted until 1941. In 1933 with unemployment at almost 17%, I suspect things were becoming a little scarce now and then and recipes reflected that many times substitutions like corn meal were necessary when flour was being rationed. This 1933 recipe indicated to brown the City Chickens in generous amounts of fat, so nearly deep fried? It also says to cook slowly over the fire or bake. At the end of the paragraph it just lists the following: “Beef and veal; beef and ham; veal and ham; beef and pork are combinations most often used.” I guess it all depended on what you could afford or what was available. The only thing continuously missing was….CHICKEN! In the July 1935 issue of the Plain-Dealer there is finally a very specific, detailed-out recipe. By 1935 my grandmother would have been thirty years old, married for almost ten years and my dad would have been eight and they were dead-nuts in the middle of the Great Depression. I wonder if this may have been a recipe that caught my grandma’s eye in the paper, except I don’t recall onions in it. But I never had City Chicken fifteen years before I was born so maybe this is how it was done. Anyway this 1935 article talks about asking your butcher for so many City Chickens you need and you will get them already skewered up, ready to cook. Even so the recipe indicates how to do it yourself. 1935 1 lb veal cutlets or steak 1 lb pork steak 1 3/4 t salt ½ t pepper 1 egg ¾ cup fine bread crumbs 2 T bacon drippings 2 T flour 2 c stock (part milk) 1 T minced onion Dash mace Scald and wipe wooden or metal skewers. With a mallet or meat hammer pound meat until flat and thin. Pound in the salt and pepper at the same time. Cut into two-inch squares. Insert skewers in center of pieces of meat, alternating the veal and pork and using five or six pieces of meat on each skewer. With fingers, mold the meat on the skewers into drumstick shape, roll in crumbs, then dip into beaten egg (diluted with a little cold water) and into fine bread crumbs again. Let stand about five minutes, then carefully brown the drumsticks in hot fat and place in casserole or baking dish. To the hot fat, add flour to form a paste, then add liquid and stir until thickened. Add seasonings and pour gravy over the meat. Cover and bake in a moderate oven one hour. Serves Eight. Reading this recipe mentions pounding the meat down flat and thin. Then threading only five or six pieces on a skewer then shaping it into drumsticks. I think now I know how the name City Chicken came around. This recipe is clear that most of the skewer was bare except for a blob of meat on about half the skewer and squeezed into that chicken drumstick shape. No wonder they called it City Chicken. In my experience, the meat was always hefty chunks and the skewer was seriously full. There was never an attempt in my family to make a fake drumstick out of it. You could eat my grandmother’s almost like a piece of corn on the cob holding the small available ends of the skewer like corn holders. My mom didn’t like the animal-food-fest my brother and I made out of City Chicken so we had to use a fork and try to slide the meat off into our plates like ladies and gentlemen. It wasn’t as fun to eat that way, but as a kid, you do what you gotta do. We’d still chew off the bits of meat still stuck to the skewer. Slight salvation. Now back to the history. Two years later, in October 1937, a reader asks the food editor for the recipe again. It is nearly identical to the 1935 recipe except it mentions oven temperature at 350 and this recipe clearly mentions cutting the meat into one-inch pieces. This would look more familiar to me. In December of 1939, the recipe surfaces again. I’m starting to see a pattern of this recipe being resurrected almost every two years since its invention. This recipe is written in paragraph form and is nearly identical to the 1937 and 1935 recipe except this time it says you don’t have to bake it with gravy, you can bake it dry. Yeah, I’ll bet it’ll be dry. But it does go on to elaborate on dry baking, namely browning them, covering, and put into a moderate oven to cook until tender. So, technially gravy-less. Then you are instructed to make gravy out of the pan drippings. I searched the archives until 1950 for mentions of City Chicken. A few mentions were about luncheons, weddings, or some other event where City Chicken would be the star of the meal. But other than that, not much mention other than these few recipes I found. Finally in May of 1950, just a few months before I was born, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer put out another recipe that actually included a picture of City Chicken. They put frills on the edges of the skewers and these were shaped into drumsticks. The recipe is the same as the 1935 version of flattening the meat and shaping into drumsticks. It also elaborates on how to make the frills, and a few incidental particulars not mentioned in 1935, like when to add the mace. Mace? Does anyone these days know what it is or what it tastes like or what it would be used for? I quit searching after 1950 because after that, there were hundreds of references to City Chicken for almost every event, dinner, family recipe and changes. It had become so popular that most grocery stores and butcher shops prepared the cubed meat and sold it with the sticks. Most of the Cleveland recipes I looked at into the late fifties, sixties, and beyond "doctored" it with a lot of various seasonings, Italian bread crumbs, cheeses, Mexican spices, different meats, deep frying, sauces, etc. But I'm a purist, I like it the way my mom and grandma fixed it when I was a little kid. Plenty of the City Chicken gravy draped over good old-fashioned, no-shortcut, mashed potatoes made with scalded milk and real butter. I was in kid heaven...then mom would walk around the table with saucepot in hand and a slotted spoon totally ruining the perfect meal by dumping off a pile of those damn PEAS in my plate. Enjoy. 1950 My Family’s 1950’s Cleveland Area Traditional City Chicken A good pound of Pork - lean loin or butt A good pound of Veal - rump roast or shoulder 6 -8 Wood skewers 6” to 8” Optional onion Peanut oil (or your choice of vegetable oils) ½ cup of Flour for dredging Salt Pepper Cup of chicken broth or boullion Your choice of gravy thickener, corn starch or flour (we use up the leftover dredging flour) Cut pork and veal into one-and-a-half inch cubes, then alternate meat cubes onto skewers. Add flour to a dish big enough to dredge the loaded skewers. Salt and pepper the flour to taste and mix. Dredge skewers in the flour mixture and set aside. In a heavy skillet with a lid, heat a half inch of the oil until hot, add skewers and brown all sides of each skewer. Drain off extra oil and add the chicken broth or boullion. Add enough water to barely cover the meat. Cover and simmer low for an hour and a half. If liquid starts to cook down add a little more. When the meat is tender, remove from the pan. Scrape up any drippings and add enough water to equal about 1 ½ to 2 cups of water in the pan, bring to rolling boil. If you use the dredging flour for your gravy, add a ¼ cup of the flour to a half cup of cold water, then quickly add to the pan and whisk until thick. If you choose to use “clean” flour, do the same. If you choose to use corn starch, use about two heaping teaspoons of the corn starch to a ½ cup of cold water, mix, then quickly add to the pan and whisk until thick. Return the skewers to the pan of gravy for a few minutes to heat the City Chickens. Use remaining gravy for mashed potatoes or drape over City Chickens in a serving platter. No doubt there are a lot of different family recipes, but this one is mine. If you’d like to add yours, use the comment box at the end of the blog and tell me where it came from and what you remember about it. Pictures of my last attempt. I used bamboo skewers because I couldn't remember where I stored the dang bag of skewers I'd bought thirty years ago. I don't recommend bamboo.
Browing City Chicken - but with bamboo skewers.
City Chicken Ready for the Oven