The Hairy-Looking Chicken Dish That Made Julia Child Cringe

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In an age of quick meals lacking flavor and flare, Julia Child showed Americans the true joys of cooking. The TV host and cookbook author gained many devoted fans from her first French cooking show in the 1960s and onward. The Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef was passionate about food, whether she was cooking or merely eating, but there was one meal that left a bad taste in her mouth. In a 1987 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Child recounted the time she and her husband, Paul Child, dined in England, where the chef supped on boiled fowl. Child explained, "The fowl was a great big leg of chicken, and they had the typical white sauce on top of it. And sticking out through the white sauce were the hairs."

Of course, we weren't there when Child was subjected to this Lovecraftian meal, but we can take a guess as to what was going on with the dish. Chicken thighs sometimes come with pinfeathers, which are small feathers that grow after a chicken has shed its current crop. These tiny protrusions bear a striking resemblance to hairs. And because removing pinfeathers is challenging, it would explain why the world-famous chef had such a hairy time during her memorable English dinner. Child had little love for the other dishes that accompanied her possibly feathery chicken, lamenting the "[o]ver-boiled vegetables ... Some horrible kind of a pudding." (Despite her world-class palate, there were other foods Child couldn't stand, including cilantro.)

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As unpleasant as they may seem, chicken feathers aren't considered dangerous to consume. (In fact, they're packed with protein but aren't digestible to humans.) However, their odd texture and bitter flavor make them as off-putting to eat as they are to look at. We also called out pinfeathers as a feature to avoid when deciding whether to buy a chicken, as they can indicate poor processing where cleaning is concerned. In the event you're saddled with hairy-looking poultry and don't want the food to go to waste, you can always pull the feathers out yourself. Keep in mind that Julia Child was a big advocate of learning how to carve your own whole chicken, so we can only assume she would have been on board with an impromptu plucking sesh.

According to Reddit, there are a few ways one can remove feathers from a piece of poultry. Commenters recommend tools like tweezers and needle-nosed pliers for the task. Another person described their preferred system for de-feathering chickens, explaining, "I'll pluck them out with rubber gloves on for grip. If I'm doing a lot, I'll have a bowl of water on the side to dip my hands into." They also suggested burning them off with a butane torch.