1) A chicken in a basket.

2) German war cry during World War 1. The Germans would shout this as they dropped pastry on to unsuspecting lemon monkeys.

This is an expression meant for good luck. The chicken is supposed to be alive, sitting in the basket, and is meant for good luck.

Chicken in a Basket

It has been one of the less welcome effects of the diversification and globalisation of British culture that British cuisine, which once enjoyed worldwide fame for its diversity, richness and quality, has lost its position of world eminence to the, perhaps inferior, cuisines of other nations (Italy, France and China spring to mind). We have touched on the strange stories behind some of our national dishes before (see 'The Yorkshire Pudding' - ed) but perhaps the strangest is that of a dish that until recently was one of the mainstays of the British diet, namely chicken in a basket.

It is perhaps appropriate that we should examine this dish so close to All Hallow's Eve, as the roots of chicken in a basket are inextricably entwined with the rich vein of the occult that runs through British history. The traditional familiar of British witches had been, from celtic times, a black chicken (note the similarity to voodoo – ed). This fact may come as a surprise to some, as the traditional witch's familiar is generally thought to be a black cat. The reason for this confusion lies in sloppy translation of the Anglo-Saxon source texts. The Anglo-Saxon for 'chicken' is 'chatken' or 'chatkin', and translators in the seventeenth century assumed this was a corruption from 'cattus', which was the vulgate Latin word for 'cat' (giving us 'chat' in French, 'katze' in German and so on), so they, almost without exception, translated this word as 'cat'. It was not u...