Recently, a customer called and asked if we had Cornish game hens available, and I explained that we offered a smaller version of a Poulet Rouge Fermier bird raised by Joyce Farms. At the end of the conversation, the customer finally asked, “What exactly is a Cornish game hen?” Drawing upon the story related in Christopher Leonard’s The Meat Racket (2014), I cynically replied that the Cornish game hen was merely a marketing ploy developed by Don Tyson in 1965 to sell small, frozen chickens when the market collapsed for larger, fresh birds. But I quickly realized that there had to be more to the story of the chicken that is neither a game bird nor even a hen.

Naturally, I first turned to labeling standards and inspection guidelines. The Poultry Inspector’s Handbook (1964) and the Poultry Grading Manual (1977) classified Rock Cornish or Cornish Game Hens as immature birds (usually 5 to 6 weeks), to be harvested separately from other chickens, and that they derived from Cornish genetics or were “pure-blooded” if they were roosters or labeled as “Cornish Young Chickens.” Today’s standards are similar but seemingly have removed the “pure-blooded” requirement. According to the USDA’s United States Classes, Standards, and Grades for Poultry (2018), a “Rock Cornish Game Hen” or Cornish game hen “is a young immature chicken (usually 5 to 6 weeks of age), weighs not more than 2 pounds ready-to-cook weight, which was prepared from a Cornish chicken or the progeny of a Cornish chicken crossed with another breed of chicken.”

While the USDA’s inspection standards over time provide insight into the genetic requirements of the bird, the guidelines fail to elucidate the diminutive chicken’s origin story, which can be traced to a series of unfortunate events in Connecticut. According to the Connecticut Poultry Association’s Yearbook in 1955, Jacques and Alphonsine “Therese” Makowsky, who immigrated to New York City after fleeing the Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940, developed the bird after a 1949 fire destroyed their retirement project, Idle Wild Farm in Pomfret Center, Conn., where they raised guinea hens. To recoup their losses, Therese Makowsky drew upon her experience living on a farm in France as a young girl and suggested that the Makowskys’ start cross breeding Cornish game cocks with other birds, with their most successful cross occurring with a Plymouth Rock Hen. The Cornish game hen was born.

They started marketing the birds to local restaurants and retailers in the Northeast and found immense success because of the bird’s larger breast meat, single serving, and sweeter flavor profile. By 1956, as the Des Moines Tribune reported, the Makowsky’s were selling nearly 6,000 birds per day. Part of the Makowskys’ success was Therese’s menu and recipe development of frozen entrées incorporating their Cornish game hen. Countless cookbooks also incorporated the hen into several recipes, mostly offering variations on stuffing the bird. By 1960, Cosmopolitan declared that the “Rock Cornish game hen” was almost as common as turkey on retail shelves.

Today, Cornish game hens are still immensely popular among chefs and retailers, especially during the holidays, and the bird’s success can be traced to the innovation of two émigrés.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention: The Case of the Cornish Game Hen

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