How Chicken Tenders Conquered America
The New York Times
The breaded, fried tenderloin turns 50 this year. Yes, there was a time before it was sold in every cafeteria and airport.
Fifty years ago, the breaded, fried chicken tender as we know it was invented in Manchester, N.H.
At least, that’s what they say in Manchester. Such claims are usually impossible to prove, and the picture is clouded in this case because of the loose way the term chicken tender gets thrown around.
Those who are not particular about poultry terminology use tender to refer to any thin strip of boneless chicken. To people in Manchester and to chicken farmers, though, it means something specific: the tenderloin, a muscle along the backbone that gets very little exercise, hence its tenderness. Restaurants were cooking chicken sticks and chicken fingers before 1974. So far, though, nobody has seriously challenged Manchester’s status as first in the nation to embrace the true tender.
Whether you fully accept the claim or not, though, the floppy strips of white meat in a deep-fried crust do seem to have first appeared around that time. If you were born in the United States more than 50 years ago, you can probably remember a world without chicken tenders. If you grew up later, you can’t.
Today, the chicken tender is not just familiar. It is triumphant. It is a fixture of school lunches and kids’ menus, of all-night diners and gas stations. It can be found at airports, food courts and stadiums. It is a major reason for the double-digit sales growth that Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, Raising Cane’s and other chicken-centric chains have reported for five straight years.
Along the way, the chicken tender has become a symbol, although its meaning is hard to pin down. It can be an icon of simple, straightforward, unpretentious American taste. It can also be an expression of dull, unadventurous food engineered for the lowest common denominator. Restaurants, in their drive to stand out, have expended great effort devising crunchier breading, zestier dipping sauces, more tender tenders. And yet all the sauces in the world will never quite dispel the suspicion that the tender itself is, at heart, not very exciting.
