This Common Fast Food Item Was Eaten Cold At Picnics During The 1950s

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

The word "picnic" often calls up old-fashioned images of checkered tablecloths spread on the ground and baskets filled with delicious goodies. That vintage imagery is appropriate, too, since outdoor picnicking as we know it today has 19th-century origins. The practice made its way from Europe to the United States around the early 1800s, and became a cornerstone of American leisure culture by the 1950s. Around this midcentury period, cold fried chicken was one of the most commonly found old-school picnic foods you were likely to spy among the trappings of a bursting-full wicker basket. Although the pairing sounds counterintuitive, serving the bird chilled was actually the standard.

Granted, without modern means of keeping hot foods hot, like insulated containers and portable electric food warmers, one didn't have much choice but to eat chicken cold at a picnic, which is, perhaps, one reason they did. Even if you took the birds directly from the frying pan, packaged them up quickly, and hastened out the door, odds were good the meat would cool significantly by the time you reached your picnic spot. But was necessity the only reason?

It turns out folks back then were onto something. Frying chicken seals in the juices and flavor, and the meat becomes more tender as the bird rests and the juices redistribute. Because cooling acts as a reduction in terms of concentrating the flavors, the seasoning often tastes more prominent than when it is piping hot. Bottom line, resting and cooling fried chicken, rather than eating it hot and fresh, can actually result in a more flavorful bird.

While cold chicken was a veritable midcentury staple, the notion of eating it at a picnic went back quite a bit further. The 1908 Kenneth Grahame novel "The Wind in the Willows," for example, depicts two characters discussing the presence of cold chicken, alongside other delicacies, in their wicker basket. A 1912 New York Times article detailed the food one would find at the "old-fashioned picnics" of an unspecified previous time period, which included, among many other things, "a few cold fried chickens."

Back then, though, the chickens in question would have generally come from a backyard flock, certainly not a grocery store's freezer section or a fast-food drive-thru, neither of which existed. So, some extra steps, like dressing the chickens and plucking their feathers, would have been necessary in preparing the dish for an outdoor excursion. This extra effort further attests to just how much people loved their fried chicken. In fact, for some families, picnics wouldn't happen at all if there wasn't adequate time to fry the poultry beforehand.

Whenever the practice of picnicking with cold chicken began, the dish was as common in 1950s lunch baskets as sandwiches are today. While it takes careful prep to prevent picnic sandwiches from getting soggy — such as using sturdy bread or assembling them onsite — properly prepared fried chicken tends to hold up well. As it cools, the skin binds to the meat and pulls slightly away from the breading; this creates a small gap that protects the crust from moisture, keeping the outer layer adequately crunchy for cold noshing.

Various fried chicken recipes were popular in the 1950s and may have been the featured dish at an outdoor feast. Buttermilk fried chicken was a commonly used recipe, as was country fried chicken, which featured a simple dredge of flour, salt, pepper, and paprika. Some unique recipes called for boiling chicken in a tomato juice base before dredging and deep-frying it; others suggested using a crushed cornflake crust for an extra-crunchy finish. Chilled roasted chicken was another midcentury favorite, often prepared by trussing multiple birds and roasting them under a heavy, herb-infused butter baste to ensure they stayed juicy for the picnic basket.

Accompanying the cold chicken that starred at the center of one's picnic, other common dishes in a 1950s picnic basket might include deviled eggs, a Jell-O salad, baked beans, pigs in a blanket (hot dogs wrapped in breading), a three-bean salad, and pie or cake. To drink, one might have hot coffee, as beverage thermoses were commonly available by this time, some lemonade, or bottles of a popular soda like Coca-Cola. In fact, in the 1940s and '50s, the Coca-Cola Co. released branded picnic coolers designed to hold up to 32 bottles of Coke, encouraging folks to make that their beverage of choice.