Hang the chicken up by the feet and kill it by bleeding it away back in the mouth.  Let it bleed to death.  Grasp the chicken’s head in your left hand, the back of its head against the palm of your hand.  Do not hold it by the neck, but grasp it by the bony part of its head and jaws.  Reach into the throat with a three-inch, narrow, sharp knife and cut toward the top and front of the head.

You will sever the big cross vein that connects the two “jugular” veins in the neck, and the blood will pour out of the mouth.  If you know how to dry-pick you will not need to be told anything by me; if you do not know it will do you no good to have me tell you, because I do not believe a person can learn to dry-pick chickens by following printed instructions.  At any rate, I could not.  I never learned until I hired a professional picker to come out from town to teach me.

So far as I can judge, it makes no difference to the consumer in the city whether the chicken is scalded or dry-picked.  There is this to be said for the scalded chicken—­that it is a more cleanly picked chicken than the dry-picked one.  The pin feathers are more easily removed when the chicken is scalded.

On the other hand, there are those feed-specializing, accurate-to-the-ten-thousandth-part-of-an-inch experts, who say that the dry-picked chicken keeps better than the scalded one.  If the weather is warmer than, say, seventy-five degrees, it might; under that, there is no difference.

I do the most of my selling in Chicago, and my place is a hundred and fifty miles south of that city; if a scalded chicken will keep when I am selling it that far away it will keep for almost anyone, because none of you is going to sell many chickens at any point more than a hundred and fifty miles from your place.

There is this caution to be observed in scalding a chicken:  Do not have the water too hot.  I had trouble on this score, and as a result my chickens were dark and did not present an appetizing appearance.  Finally I bought a candy thermometer—­one that registered up to 400 degrees.  By experimenting I found that 180 degrees was the point at which a chicken scalded to pick the easiest, but that a chicken scalded at 165 degrees presented a better appearance after being picked and cooled.  Whichever method you use, observe this rule:  Pick your chicken clean.

After my chicken has cooled out enough so the flesh will cut easily, I draw it.  I chop off the head close up, draw back the skin of the neck a couple of inches, and then cut off the neck.  The flap of skin thus left serves to cover the bloody and unsightly stub of the neck.  Next I open up the chicken from behind and below the vent and pull out the gizzard—­if the chicken has been kept off feed for twenty-four hours the empty crop will come with it—­intestines and liver.  I remove the gall bladder from the liver, open and clean the gizzard, and replace it and the liver in the chicken.