Recipe: I don't believe City Chicken is a unique recipe

AFAIK, "city chicken" refers to any "mock" chicken dish (usually, substituting pork for the chicken).

Presumably, in early part of the 20th century, chicken was rather expensive compared to other kinds of meat, and therefore often reserved for Sunday dinner. The story goes that during the depression, when cash was particularly short (ummm...like today?), a lot of folks (often blue-collar city residents) adapted their "Sunday" chicken recipes to enable them to substitute cheaper cuts of meat-and pork was fairly cheap.

It may seem odd to us today, but if you think about it, it's not all that different from a lot of the processed food we eat. For example, you will often find that pork is a key ingredient in the veal "patties" sold in the frozen-food section of the supermarket. (In fact, pork is probably a better substitute for veal than most would think: I'm willing to bet that if you actually substituted a piece of pork (say, a loin chop) for the veal in your favorite veal parmigiana recipe, most of your dinner guests wouldn't know the difference.)

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Recipes for City Chicken