The original motivation for assembling these was fear.

(A year ago a wine group of Burgundian origin collaborated with a restaurant
to organize a mid-winter Burgundian-style country dinner in northern
California. California is far from Burgundy, though the chef had Burgundian
experience including at Marc Meneau's L'Esperance near Vézelay. Effort was
necessary to find fresh hens approximating those of Bresse, which were
indeed round as apples, as below; and butter and other ingredients. The
fear was that some US diners might hesitate to visit a fine restaurant for
fare like "boiled chicken" and "poached eggs," so the quotations, by popular
writers I'd long enjoyed about Burgundian food, were advanced to help
explain. In fact, when people saw the eggs en meurette with their wine
sauce and bacon bits and croutons, and the truffled poulardes "demi-deuil"
as below, none refused them. My kickback for assembling the quotations was
poaching stock from the truffled fowls.)


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"When you see poulet de Bresse on the menu (or in the most knowing circles,
poularde de Bresse, for the hen is reputed to be better eating than the
cock), you should be getting the finest chicken available in France."

-- Waverly Root, _The Food of France,_ Knopf, 1958 (LCC 57-10310)


Wechsberg describes the Bresse poulardes of M. et Mme. Dumaine at the Hôtel
de la Côte d'Or in Saulieu, with thin slices of truffles under the skin,
steamed in the aroma of a covered pot-au-feu of beef and fresh vegetables,
which slightly expands the truffled fowl, a sauce then being made from the
bird's juices. Shortly afterwards he describes a dish of fowls "demi-deuil,
which means `half-mourning' because of the black-and-white effect of the
black truffles under the white skin" at Mother Brazier's near Lyon.

Joseph Wechsberg, _Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an
Epicure,_ Academy Chicago; ISBN: 0897331346, paperback reprint ed.


"Adam and Eve sold themselves for an apple. What would they have done for a
truffled fowl?" (Attrib. to J.-A. de Brillat-Savarin)


More from Brillat-Savarin, in Le Physiologie du Goût (Fisher's translation):

Three districts of the old prerevolutionary France can quarrel over the
honor of providing the best poultry, namely Caux, Mans, and Bresse.

As far as capons are concerned, there is some question, and whatever is
immediately on the tip of the fork will seem the best; but for fat pullets,
the preference goes to those of Bresse, which are called poulardes fines and
which are round as apples; it is a great pity that they are so scarce in
Paris, where they never are found except in hampers from the country.
[Meditation 6, section 34.]