Spring Chickens and Maiden Eggs

 The Foochows loved to eat female chickens or free range spring chickens . They would always steam them as a nourishing broth. When I was a kid, my grandmother would give me a few spoons of the soup as a reward for being an obedient child.

When I was studying in Kuala Lumpur and enjoyed mainly Cantonese food, I was introduced to Spring Chicken Rice. The food stalls advertise their chickens as Virgin Chickens and not spring chickens.

But today it is not easy to find free range female aka spring chickens also.

It is hard to distinguish young female chickens which have not started laying eggs. Could  one be distinguished from another by the sound of its voice?

The way it walks? Or the shape of its body?

I once observed my aunt slaughtering a female chicken which was so slight in body, probably less than 2 katis. The chicken looked mature enough but when she cut opened the stomach cavity she let out a sound of dismay.

"What a pity. She has eggs forming already!" So the chicken was not a virgin?

And I learned a very painful and embarrassing lesson when a rough aunty went to the chicken market to buy a spring chicken. I must have been like 11 years old. She wanted to give my grandmother a gift.

And to my shock, she put her forefinger into the back of the small chicken..just to give it a test. 

I wanted death to come to me, or the earth to swallow me up. How could she do that!!

Photo from Google.

Note : To this day I am still amused by the Chinese liking Virgin Chickens (e.g. Maria's Virgin Chicken Stall in Singapore). Some Cantonese seem to be a bit refine when calling their dish, Little Chicken instead of Virgin Chicken. Old retired hens are used mainly by the indigenous people to prepare bamboo chickens.

Do we even have gender discrimination in eating/food?
Spring Chicken Bak Kut Teh. Photo from Google.

And a reference to Western concept of Spring Chicken is here :

In Commonwealth countries, poussin (pronounced /ˈpuːsæn/ and less commonly called coquelet) is a butcher's term for a young chicken, less than 28 days old at slaughter and usually weighing 400–450 grams (14–16 oz) but not above 750 grams (26 oz). It is sometimes also called spring chicken, although the term spring chicken usually refers to chickens weighing 750–850 grams (26–30 oz). The word is the French language term for the same thing. Normally a portion is a whole poussin per person.

In the United States, poussin is an alternative name for a small-sized cross-breed chicken called Rock Cornish game hen, developed in the late 1950s, which is twice as old and twice as large as the typical British poussin.