City chicken

City chicken is an American dish of cubed meat, usually pork, threaded onto a wooden skewer to resemble a drumstick, then breaded and fried or baked; despite the name, it almost never contains actual chicken. A similar dish called mock chicken existed by 1908, but city chicken itself emerged during the Great Depression, with the earliest documented references appearing in Pittsburgh newspapers and cookbooks in the early 1930s. Cooks in working-class meatpacking cities such as Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville and Pittsburgh devised the dish because pork and veal scraps were cheaper than chicken at the time, skewering them into a makeshift drumstick shape. A 1926 article in a Binghamton newspaper is credited with giving the dish its now-ironic name. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/