In
Commonwealth countries
The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of 56 sovereign states. Most of them were British colonies or dependencies of those colonies.
No one government in the Commonwealth exercises power over the others, as is the case in a po ...
, poussin (pronounced and less commonly called coquelet) is a butcher's term for a young
chicken
The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domesticated junglefowl species, with attributes of wild species such as the grey and the Ceylon junglefowl that are originally from Southeastern Asia. Rooster or cock is a term for an adult m ...
, less than 28 days old at slaughter and usually weighing but not above . It is sometimes also called spring chicken, although the term spring chicken usually refers to chickens weighing . The word is the
French language
French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Gaul, and more specifically in Nor ...
term for the same thing. Normally a portion is a whole poussin per person.
In the United States, ''poussin'' is an alternative name for a small-sized
cross-breed
A crossbreed is an organism with purebred parents of two different breeds, varieties, or populations. ''Crossbreeding'', sometimes called "designer crossbreeding", is the process of breeding such an organism, While crossbreeding is used to main ...
chicken called
Rock Cornish game hen, developed in the late 1950s, which is twice as old and twice as large as the typical British poussin.
External links
The British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affair' definition of poussin and coqueletThe British Assured Food Standards organisation's definition of poussin.
Chicken as food
{{poultry-stub
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