Chicken Fingers Were Created In Manchester, NH! Or Were They?

Chicken Finger Day was founded by Raising Cane’s, a Louisiana-based fast food chain that produces southern chicken fingers. Raising Cane’s, founded in 1996, has over 385 restaurants in over 24 states as well as international countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

• Raising Cane’s began through the CEO and Founder Todd Graves, who was originally told the idea wouldn’t work by both his college professors and banks.
• From there, he saved his own money, working 90-hour shifts as a boilermaker and fishing commercially in Alaska. After finally being able to get an SBA loan, he began construction on the first Raising Cane’s in Baton Rouge. Once it opened, the business became a huge success!
• Chicken tenders are actually parts of a chicken. They are the little strips of meat that are tenuously attached to the underside of each breast (and thus sometimes called “hanging tenders”), so every chicken has two tenders.
• Chicken tenders the dish, sometimes also called chicken fingers or chicken strips, are chicken tenders that are breaded and deep fried, which explains why the two are synonymously named.
• One wouldn’t think of chicken tenders as something that had to be invented, but The Puritan Backroom in Manchester, N.H., claims to have done just that in 1974, writes USA Today.
• The restaurant’s use of the “chicken tenders” name reportedly was a first, but chicken fingers were already in existence
• In 1976, when three friends (Alben Yarborough, Ansley Williams, and Dusty Yarborough) began construction on Spanky’s down on River Street In Savannah. Originally, they planned on opening a pizza and burger joint.  Alben, on the other hand, wouldn’t print a menu without some chicken on it.
• In December of ’76, Alben decided to make a chicken breast sandwich. Those big breasts were too big for the buns, so they had to trim the edges. Not being wasteful, he seasoned ‘em a bit a threw them in the deep fryer. When they came out I thought, ‘whew, this’ll work!”
• The inventor of the chicken nugget was Robert C Baker, a professor of Cornell University, qualified in food science, who published the recipe in an academic paper in the early 1960s.
• Chicken nuggets are a poultry-based food, that are generally small pieces of crumbed covered meat, and are eaten as a snack or part of a main meal.
• Chicken nuggets have been highly popularised in takeaway restaurants, especially the symbolic Chicken McNuggets of McDonalds, and the first nuggets to be sold by McDonalds was in 1980.
• Poultry are domesticated birds kept by humans for the purpose of producing eggs, meat, and/or feathers. Poultry comes from the French/Norman word, poule, itself derived from the Latin word Pullus, which means small animal.
• Poultry is the second most widely eaten meat in the world, accounting for about 30% of meat production worldwide, after pork at 38%.
• With 25 billion chickens in the world, there are more of them than any other bird species
• This bird was probably first domesticated for the purpose of cockfights, not as food.
• Roosters perform a little dance called ‘tidbitting’ in which they make sounds (food calls) and move their head up and down, picking up and dropping a bit of food. Researchers have found that females prefer males that often perform tidbitting and have larger, brighter combs on top of their heads.
• A female chicken will mate with many different males but if she decides, after the deed is done, that she doesn’t want a particular rooster’s offspring and can eject his sperm. This occurs most often when the male is lower in the pecking order.

Sources:

Days of the Year

Kitchn

Eater

Ten Random Facts

Mobile-Cuisine

Smithsonian Magazine

South Magazine