May 6, 2025 – Andy is in OurLittleCorner today

The Ascent of the Pectoralis Minor – A Tender Tale

Chicken is a pretty big deal here at BigLittleMeals .   We’ve tested and posted at least thirty recipes calling for, among other things, chicken wings, chicken thighs (bone-in and boneless and skin-on and skin-off), chicken breasts, and the whole chicken.  Furthermore, we’ve offered Italian, Indian, Mexican, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Jamaican, Cajun, and Middle Eastern options for cooking chicken.  I’ve even gone so far as to master the art of spatchcocking. Cleary, I know a thing or two about chicken.

So you can understand my surprise a couple of weeks ago when I discovered that one of the most popular chicken snacks in the U.S., chicken tenders, is made with a part of the chicken I had never heard of – the “pectoralis minor” (not to be confused with the “pectoralis major”). I came across this bit of food trivia in an article by NY Times food critic Pete Wells, “How Chicken Tenders Conquered America.” He tells the tale of how this obscure chicken muscle was transformed into a culinary superstar.

By most accounts, the chicken tender was invented in the 1970s at the Puritan Backroom, a Manchester NH restaurant established by Greek immigrants in 1917. As the story goes, Charlie Pappas (the son of one of the original owners) considered it wasteful to discard the small pieces of chicken that would come loose from the breast bone while the kitchen staff prepped the chickens. This small wayward piece of chicken, sometimes referred to as the tenderloin, is actually a muscle – the pectoralis minor. In 1974, after some tinkering, Pappas settled on a method of marinating it in pineapple juice before breading and frying it. It caught on with customers and eventually became wildly popular. The chicken tenders gained so much acclaim that the Puritan Backroom became a mandatory stop for candidates during the New Hampshire presidential primaries.

[Editor’s note: Pete Wells reports that the the Puritan Backroom fries around “four tons of tenders most weeks, and sometimes more.” I find this hard to swallow and am searching for sources to verify this claim. Regardless, its clear that lots of those pectoralis minor morsels get consumed.]

In a twist to this tale, chicken tenders became a household name not because of the Puritan Backroom fame, but because in the 1980s Burger King began an advertising blitz for its own version of “chicken tenders,” which, in lieu of the pectoralis minor, were made with strips of breast meat (aka the pectoralis major) or other parts of the chicken. After a legal battle over the name, a jury decided (in Burger King’s favor) that the words “chicken tender” described a product rather than a particular chicken part. The upshot is that much of what we see marketed as “chicken tenders” is not the real McCoy – at least according to those who claim to be connoisseurs.

Helen Rosner, former executive editor of Eater and current food correspondent for The New Yorker, is a self-proclaimed connoisseur of chicken tenders. In a 2015 article she observes that chicken tenders often appear on kids’ menus – and that is a good thing:

She goes on to assert that an “immutable rule” for any true connoisseur of chicken tenders is that they should be made with the petoralis minor. She admits that it’s rare to find actual tenders and that if you order them you’ll most likely be getting “fingers” or “strips” – what she considers “terms of art that veil all manner of creative butchery.”

Although I’m certainly no connoisseur of chicken tenders, reading about their origins motivated me to take a stab at frying up an “authentic” batch of my own. So I went to our well-stocked meat department at the nearby Sonoma Market to buy some petoralis minor pieces. The meat-savvy manager, who we’ve dealt with for years, knew exactly what I was referring to. But he told me that he never carried them and wondered why anyone would bother cooking such random chicken parts, especially when perfectly good chicken breasts were to be had. I told him the rags-to-riches tale of the petoralis minor at the Puritan Backroom but that only prompted him to offer suggestions on how to make perfectly good “chicken tenders” using breast meat (aka petoralis major). So much for making my own petoralis minor tenders!

It appears that my only option for a first-hand culinary experience with authentic chicken tenders is to make a pilgrimage to the Puritan Backroom . I’ve checked into available flights from SFO to Manchester, NH. Now all I have to do is convince Ann that experiencing a little authenticity is worth $721 per ticket. Wish me luck.