19 May 2011, Posted by admin in EAT + DRINK, 1 Comments

A Recipe For Raising Chickens (And Children) Circa 1975

And now, for a flashback to Minnie Rose Lovgreen’s highly entertaining 30-page “book” (really more of a pamphlet), Recipe for Raising Chickens (transcribed and edited by Nancy Rekow and Chaya Siegelbaum). First published a few months prior to Lovgreen’s death in 1975 at the age of 86, the book has sold more than 20,000 copies. Not half bad for a manual that tells you how to raise chickens in frank backyard farming terms. That it is a hoot (cluck? sorry) to read surely helps. For a few snipits of advice from Lovgreen on raising chickens — and children –  turn the page.

“If you peek in at a setting [nesting] hen, and she says, ‘Kwark, kwark, kwark,’ in a deep, ugly voice, [she means] to say, ‘Don’t bother me.’”

When a mother hen “says, in a deep tone, ‘Crrrk, crrrk, crrk,’ [it's] as much as saying, ‘Hush, everything will be all right.’”

“I hang a strip of burlap all the way along their nest boxes. Split it up, so it’s like little panel curtains. That way each hen can lay her egg in her box and duck out her little curtain. They like privacy when they lay.”

“It’s really better to take the first-hatched chicks into your house for a while as soon as they’ve dried off under the hen… if you don’t take them in, quite often she’ll get excited over some of them and mash them, you see, so you’ll find a few dead ones.”

“If you like, you can buy more chicks to put under [the hen.]… you have to sneak them under the hen when it’s dark at night.”

– From Recipes for Raising Chickens by Minnie Rose Lovgreen, transcribed and edited by Nancy Rekow and Chaya Siegelbaum.