Fancy Fowl

Victoria fancied all sorts of animals, and the fancier the better. As queen, Lawler writes, she was thrilled by the “lions, tigers, and leopards,” which she described as “barbaric offerings” when they were presented to her as gifts from “tropical princes.” In turn, she gifted these animals to the London Zoo, which she regularly visited.

Albert, too, was fond of animals, particularly birds. After the couple married in 1840, they set to work finding a site for, and then building, an aviary, which was expanded to include a grand poultry house after the arrival of the Sumatran chickens.

Even before Victoria and Albert had completed their very fancy chicken coop for their new exotic birds, the royal poultry keeper, James Walter, began breeding them with the ancestors of the Dorking chickens that had been brought to the British Isles by the Romans in the 1st century. Thanks to Walter’s work with the queen’s flock, in 1846, as potato famine strangled Ireland, Victoria and Albert were able to send three hens and a rooster crossbred from the descendants of Belcher’s original Sumatran birds to Dublin in the hopes that the offspring of these bigger, higher-egg-producing chickens might help feed a starving nation.

By 1849, descendants of those same chickens had made their way to the eastern United States. There, the rise in the price of prized poultry paralleled the cost of picks and shovels out west, where the California Gold Rush was already in progress. While the price of poultry would eventually abate, crashing hard in 1855, the nation’s—indeed, the world’s—taste for chicken did not. Within four decades, in 1890, the year Harland Sanders was born, Lawler tells us that more than 280 million chickens would lay 10 billion eggs in the United States, a steep rise in the popularity of poultry compared to the beginning of the century, when chicken eggs and meat were mostly consumed by enslaved peoples, whose masters preferred ducks and geese.

Queen Victoria, an abolitionist whose title gave her an outsize influence on trends of the day, helped make chicken a food so universally associated with wholesome nourishment that within just a few decades after her death, politicians would start promising would-be voters a “chicken in every pot.” By the time KFC franchises were spreading across the nation after World War II, all Colonel Sanders had to do to sell his deep-fried breasts, wings, drumsticks, and thighs was to promise customers that his birds were so full of fat, they’d happily lick their fingers to keep the tasty grease from running down their elbows.

The crash of hen fever in 1855 made such table manners possible, for the chicken would not have become so universally consumed if its price had remained at $700 for a breeding pair. The collapse was also a boon to Charles Darwin, who was finally able to afford enough chickens to study—Darwin’s work with chickens would inform On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859.