Wait what? Behold the Hönstavlan!!

This feathery masterpiece is attributed to Johan Pasch the Elder and was commissioned by Tessin as a Christmas gift to himself.1 Best remembered as an arts patron, collector, and all-around Francophile, Tessin brought continental Enlightenment approaches to art and science to the Swedish court.

He was also an infamous Peeping Tom—according to the Nationalmuseum, don’t @ me—who was inspired after he stumbled upon ladies from the court of Crown Princess Lovisa Ulrika getting dressed.2

And yes, the rooster lurking behind them is supposed to represent Tessin as the…erect cock lording over his mutant flock of six hens.3 Because all of this was apparently too subtle, Tessin added an accompanying French verse that translates as “What accursed rooster would not crow, O hens, on seeing your features and charms?”4 Basically, who would not want to…rise to the occasion, having seen what he saw? 😈

But don’t be fooled into thinking this was merely a private perversion. The resulting painting was presented at a court gathering attended by the hens themselves.5 Tessin even had the image turned into gaming counters (basically like poker chips), as part of his broader efforts to entertain, flatter, and curry favor with members of the court.6 Which goes to show that the “what’s the matter sweetheart, can’t you take a joke” approach has been around for centuries.🤡

Fortunately for us all, this zoomorphic trope is its own genre. One important prototype is Giacomo Franco’s La Chasse à la chouette, a late-sixteenth-century composition that spawned numerous painted copies.7 Franco’s image refers to a method of owl hunting in which a live owl was tethered to attract other birds. Here, the hunting strategy becomes an allegory warning young men not to fall for a pretty face. 🦉💅

Over time, this bird-human hybrid would recur as an aristocratic in-joke—see Louis-Antoine de Gontaut, duc de Biron, depicted as a peacock, which feels fairly self-explanatory—and eventually into political satire where the “bird brain” insult continues on today.8

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If the Hönstavlan is a lady stuffed inside a hen, the Chicken Kyiv is apparently a vessel for anything and everything. Here’s the convoluted history: the dish emerged from a Franco-Russian tradition of breaded and stuffed poultry dishes.9 It is often linked to the Continental Hotel in Kyiv, but by the 1910s, the dish and its recipes were embraced widely by Soviet diners with bourgeois aspirations. These early dishes were made from minced chicken or veal, pounded together with egg, bread, milk, and butter, then wrapped around another lump of butter and fried into something resembling a meat croquette.🧈🧈🧈

By the 1930s, this artery-busting ball crossed the pond to appear in Russian-themed restaurants in Chicago and New York. In 1946, The New York Times published their Chicken Kyiv recipe, helping the dish shrug off its haute-cuisine origins and become a synecdoche for a pan-Soviet cuisine (and in turn, the Sovietization of Ukrainian cuisine).10

I recently ate Chicken Kyiv at two places that are themselves a hodgepodge of cultural referents. The first was at Tatiana, the Brighton Beach stalwart, for our friend Tatiana’s birthday party, where I vaguely remember chomping through some chicken between bouts of dancing and drunken clapping. The second was at Aleksandra, a Russian-themed restaurant aboard a Tallink overnight ferry connecting the Baltics.11 Both restaurants served the long-Westernized version: breaded chicken breasts rolled around garlic-and-parsley butter, far removed from those early versions from the Soviet Union.

The dish’s current ubiquity, however, probably owes more to Marks & Spencer than to any Soviet chef. A young product developer, Cathy Chapman, suggested a ready-to-cook meal that was breaded and flash fried. The British department store launched its ready-to-cook “Chicken Kiev” in 1979, and it sold so well that M&S established a separate factory dedicated to its production. In the decades since, it has become a ready-to-eat staple. And I am horrified to report that 2023 mutations of the dish at Iceland (the frozen food grocer in the UK) have included Nacho, Tikka, and Hoisin.😵‍💫

Then again, what dish could be more emblematic of the past two centuries of imperialism? While it originated as a traditional continental cuisine designed for aristocratic tables, it then passed through the Russian Empire and the Soviet project of standardizing national cuisines, to end up serving the last empire still standing: the capitalist demand for convenience.

So go forth and stuff a Chicken Kyiv with Mango Chutney Butter. Fill that saucy unit with gochujang and kimchi. Convert it into a cheese dip. Turn it into whatever your cardiovascular system can withstand. And should you encounter some hot people you would like to stuff inside chicken bodies, please make sure you paint them as the plumpest, fluffiest, and sexiest chickens possible.

Tatiana’s and Aleksandra’s Chicken Kyivs: 🐓🐓🐓🐓/5 for ambiance: burlesque at the former, red velvet interior lit by midnight sun at the latter.

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^{Doucai ‘Chicken Cup’. Sotheby’s Sale, April 8, 2014.}

The Chicken Cup refers to a specific type of small porcelain wine cup first popularized in China during the Chenghua period (1465–87), with a shape inspired by ancient ceremonial ware. These 15th-century cups are a type of doucai ware, a porcelain technique that undergoes multiple firings to allow cobalt-blue underglaze outlines and colored overglaze enamels to shine through.

The motifs are both historically grounded and engage in contemporary wordplay. Chickens have long been featured in ancient rituals and recur in Chinese portent treatises as well as Song dynasty literati scrolls.1 Beyond this, the cups feature the fowls alongside the cockscomb plant, which apparently sound together like the auspicious phrase “may you continuously rise in rank.”2

^{A chicken wine cup in the 1676 edition of Sanli tu, a 12th c antiquarian text}

For these august-to-charming reasons, the wine cups commanded astronomical prices from day one and continued to be coveted by emperors. The director of the imperial kiln in the Chenghua period reportedly described them as “rarer and more precious than dragon spoons or ancient vessels of bronze,” and noted that “wealthy people prefer them to books or any other antiques.”3 Two centuries later, the Qing scholar Cheng Zhe wrote, “a cup of tea in such a Chenghua cup is dearer than wine…and dearest and most appealing of all are the so-called chicken cups with pecking and confronted chickens.”4

The aforementioned Shanghai collector Liu Yiqian—who paid the $36 m with his Amex Centurion Card (for the points!!)—did drink tea from the cup, apparently to make some kind of a point about Chinese art collectors. Though given that he’s now offloading his collection, perhaps the true moral is that no one escapes the poultry-industrial complex unscathed.

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I have been feeling like a confronted chicken in my quest to locate some kind of a chicken martini.5 🍗🍸

As a tax-paying denizen of the Frankentini capital of the world, a.k.a. New York, I’m no stranger to the maximalist ’tinis. This long list includes the garlic bread martini at San Sabino, the MSG martini at Bonnie’s, the Feta Brine Martini at Mr. Melo, the Sour Cream & Onion Martini at the Corner Store, the Pizza Martini at Bar Valentina, the Borscht Martini at the Russian Samovar, the kimchi martini at Golden Hof, an oyster martini at Bistrot Ha, with an honorable mention for the Fish Sauce Vesper at Smithereens.

While there is apparently a McNugget tini currently being rolled out to the ultrarich in the East End, the “chicken-tini” is still elusive for those of us on this side of Long Island.

Bar Snack no longer serves the bouillon-flavored, chicken-chicharron topped Boat Snack Martini, although my visit was worth it to witness the bartender gamely respond to another patron’s prompt for a drink “that pairs well with nicotine gum.”

Instead, there are three kinds of currently à la carte chicken-adjacent martinis in New York: a butter chicken-flavored martini at INDN6, a karaage martini at Shinji7, and, finally, the yakitini at Sip, the downstairs savory Valhalla of Sip & Guzzle.

I personally trekked to Sip, an underground den of tech bros, tourists, and Lean-and-Tan-WASPs^TM trying to curry favor with their temporarily disillusioned daughters at NYU. The menu identifies three ingredients for the $28 Yakitini8: dirty martini, binchotan, and schmaltz—none of them ingredients in and of themselves but a combination of cooking processes. When pressed, the bartender told me that it’s a vodka and shochu mix clarified in chicken fat, and served with a freshly torched single piece of green onion, pre-doused in tare and chicken fat.

^{Behold, the yaki-schmaltz-tini}

Your experience of this cocktail will depend greatly on when you decide to eat this fragrant garnish. Without it, the cocktail tastes like the best alcoholic chicken broth; after it, it transforms into drinking shochu with the backwash of someone who has been eating yakitori all night long.

Is it a better cocktail than the uni sour that my curiosity made me order at Corima? Sure. Would I like to see how many pounds of chicken-terrine topped “fantasy salad” $28 will get me at Tashkent’s buffet just two blocks away? That’s an answer for a mayo-enthusiast to answer on my behalf.

But if you owned a chicken cup, you could bring the tcup to Sip and ask them to serve the martini in it (and ask for a side car for volume parity), and it might be like the last scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Which character you are in that clip may depend entirely on your net worth.

Rating: 🐓🐓/5

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The painting also features a handful of poultry-licious proverbs, including:

• Who knows why the geese go barefoot? (everything has a reason, even though it may not be obvious)—a more Calvinist version of “why did the chicken cross the road?”

• To keep the hen’s egg and let the goose’s egg go (to make a bad decision)

• To be a hen feeler (to be stingy, i.e. feeling whether the hen is about to lay an egg before you slaughter it)

  

^{Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Image in the public domain}

Made for an unknown patron, the painting would have appealed to the proverb-pilled literati, who were drawn to these didactic devices for their marriage of wit and persuasion with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. While proverbs had been embraced by orators and writers in clerical, courtly, and religious settings since the late medieval period, vernacular proverbs became prevalent through publications such as Erasmus’s Adagia (1500) and artworks such as Frans Hogenberg’s The Blue Cloak (ca. 1560)1—largely considered the predecessor to Bruegel’s dense masterpiece.

Paintings such as Netherlandish Proverbs would also have appealed to contemporary patriotic sentiments. The art historian Margaret Carroll suggests that, against the backdrop of Habsburg Spanish rule in the Netherlands, Bruegel’s compilation of vernacular proverbs would have been received as a response to “emerging ethnic and political self-consciousness.”

^{This man is really feeling the hen 🫴}

Even though the painting was a mirror of Bruegel’s turbulent social and political moment, its satire of wealth, privilege, and the inversion of social hierarchies remain evergreen. In fact, many of the phrases are still easily identified by contemporary Dutch and Flemish speakers, so check out the full list of proverbs before you hit on a lingering member of the Orange Army or ascendant Red Devils this World Cup season.

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Long before Julia Child famously said that “the only real test of a good chef is a perfectly roasted chicken,” the gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin declared, “one becomes a cook, but one is born a rôtisseur.”2 The roast chicken at The Fly proves that they’ve got some born roasters in their Bed-Stuy kitchen.

^yom

As someone who’s chased rotisserie chickens in more than 30 different countries, The Fly is the gold standard. They don’t have the advantage of using rare breeds like poulet de Bresse or Yeonsan Ogye, nor does the stainless-steel tray presentation come anywhere close to the $250 baroque horror that is the “Chobster”, a confusing combination of chicken and lobster at Daniel Boulud’s Maison Barnes, presented in vintage lobster “armor.” 🦞⚔️

^{Incredible sensory play tray}

According to an Eater article from 2019, the armor-less chicken at The Fly is dry rubbed with Indian fennel, coriander, Spanish paprika, garlic, Aleppo pepper, and Greek oregano, then finished with tomato jus and olive oil. It arrives soaked. It squelches, and you can’t tell if it’s skin, thigh, or breast melting on your tongue like a savory flan, gliding from sweet to umami in one titillating stroke. Amid the rotisserie chicken wars in New York, where a half chicken can get up to $80-plus, The Fly charges a tidy $34, which is still both obscene for non-NY standards and hardly more than two happy-hour martinis with tip.

The humble poulet rôti is a relatively new addition to culinary history. Humankind has been cooking animals on a spit since the dawn of time, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, roasting jacks were sometimes powered by water (check out Cragside House) or even by a special kind of small dog called a turnspit dog, a teeny-tiny breed that ran on a wooden treadmill to make sure meat roasted evenly.3 🥹

^{Taxidermy of “Whiskey” the turnspit dog. Abergavenny Museum, Wales.}

Up until the 19th century, however, other game birds like geese, duck, and pheasants dominated the spit roast. Chicken was largely a luxury meat reserved for special occasions or eaten as the product of cockerels and unproductive hens culled from the laying flock (see: the “hen feeler”). It was only after WWII, that industrial farming and the invention of the electric roaster together demoted the roast chicken from a luxury item to a mass-market dish.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a roast chicken in a bag. But if you feel like you’ve been tossing feathers in the wind, and don’t want to be a hen feeler, try the roast bird at The Fly.

^{Dish Rating: 🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓 / 5}

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