Searching for the chicken in Petaluma, the former Egg Basket of the World

Kingdom of 10,000,000 White Leghorns. Chickaluma. The Egg Basket of the World.

These were all once nicknames for Petaluma, a charming little city in the agricultural bosom of Sonoma County. By the early 1900s, a booming poultry industry, driven by a locally designed egg incubator, saw the area producing 120 million eggs a year. There were Egg Day parades led by Egg Queens, the world’s only poultry pharmacy and more money on deposit in the banks, per capita, than any other place on earth.

But how chickeny is Petaluma… now?

To find out, my partner and I drive into the countryside under a misty sun that looks like a big egg yolk. We carry the determination of Cool Hand Luke to eat 50 eggs or explode trying. Entering Petaluma, evidence of its feathered past peeks out from every corner. Chickens are painted on fading shop walls, metal roosters stand outside a restaurant, and the fairground harbors a huge sculpture of a white hen. That last one requires occasional repairs, because the local children like to ride it like a horsey.

For breakfast, we stop at Stellina Pronto, an Italian bakery downtown that makes a stellar egg frittata. The owners used to run Osteria Stellina in Point Reyes; when that closed during the pandemic, they opened this casual place which serves pastries, sandwiches and third-wave coffee accompanied by Straus dairy. The counter is piled so high with fresh-baked treats, we have a brain fizzle – do we want a breakfast puff with Point Reyes Toma cheese … or tomato focaccia … or a hazelnut brutti ma buoni (a Piedmontese meringue whose name means “ugly but good”)?

Eggs. Eggs. Eggs. Get here before 11 a.m., if you want the best chance of snagging Stellina’s fluffy frittatas, which come with local Caggiano Italian sausage and Hobbs ham or fresh veggies with herbs and cheese. They’re slow-cooked in a cast-iron skillet with organic eggs from Coastal Hill Farm, a co-op west of town that gets Instagram raves like: “Your eggs r the best we have ever had in our lifetime! The color looks like yellow velvet and the taste is insane!”

Our thirst for albumen now lit, we head out in search of the real, raw deal. The countryside around Petaluma is peppered with farm stands that sell fresh eggs by the dozen. They’re usually more expensive than at grocery stores, but you’ll taste the difference in quality when whipping up something delicious at home.

We pull up at Hicks Mountain Hens, an unmanned stand that sells fresh eggs ($10 per dozen) and raw honey and that has a coin-operated machine for chicken feed. When we approach the machine, what previously was an empty nearby field becomes a sea of chickens – thousands of beaks and beady eyes and flapping wings pressing against the wire fence. A tourist family delights in the frenzy, with the little girl tossing feed into the hive-mass of poultry.

Up the road is Tenfold Farmstand, tucked in a historic two-room schoolhouse that dates back to 1895. Barn shelves are stocked with chard and eggplants and mini Juliet tomatoes, as well as organic vegetable starts for your garden. Inside are intricate floral arrangements, baskets of the season’s last strawberries – dark-red and deeply fragrant – and the treasure we seek: fresh eggs from Tara Firma Farms, with yolks like liquid gold ($15 a dozen).

Tenfold is something of a community hub. On Friday mornings, it has live farm music and Blooms End, a traveling bakery pop-up with a cult following. And the events lineup includes vintage-clothing sales, holiday fairs, kids’ book swaps and classes on making kokedama – Japanese-style balls of moss for growing ornamental plants.

While we now have eggs – which will later be transformed into sponge cake and fresh pasta – what we don’t have are answers. How did Petaluma get to be such a poultry town? We head to the free Petaluma Historical Library and Museum located downtown in a gorgeous Andrew Carnegie library, which has a permanent exhibit about the local chicken industry on its upper mezzanine.

There’s a 1950s egg-cleaning machine with long screws like some backwoods torture device, poultry lung and kidney removers and photos of one of the city’s many Egg Queens who marched in egg parades. This Queen’s wearing a feathered dress and posing on a chicken sculpture among her adoring retinue – a barnyard Venus de Milo.

It was around the 1870s, when a local dentist named Isaac Dias patented an artificial egg incubator, that the industry started taking off. The incubator sped up the process of hatching, allowing hens to skip nesting duty and lay more eggs. By 1925, Petaluma was the largest poultry center in the world with 2 million hens, and by the time World War II rolled around, it had hit peak production of 612 million eggs a year.

Dias was later joined in marketing his incubator by a fellow named Lyman Byce. When Dias died in a suspicious duck-hunting accident, Byce endeavored to take the credit for the invention and erase Dias’ name from history. At the museum, a portrait of Dias has his face blank because no photos of him exist anymore. Downtown there’s a mural of Byce by “his” incubator; hunched over and sporting a shady mustachio, he literally looks like he’s stealing eggs.

Petaluma eventually fell from poultry prominence due to a variety of reasons, including industry automation and lack of government subsidies. We study a USDA poster about egg quality – an AA egg means the “white is thick, stands high” – then head out for more eggs, this time in liquid form. Barber Lee Spirits is a craft distillery whose barrel-tasting room sports a mural of a fierce rooster. You can get flights of double gold-winning spirits such as single-malt rye, heirloom-corn bourbon, absinthe and moonshine, or cocktails as expertly made as anywhere in San Francisco.

We get a Fuzzy Buzzy Julep with bourbon, honey, lemon, fresh mint and a topping of egg white ($15). If you’re into eggy drinks, they’re happy to whip you up something experimental – a Midnight Rider with apple brandy, activated charcoal and egg white, say, or a Big Baller with absinthe blanche, Madeira, brandied cherry syrup and frothed egg.

At this point, we’ve become well-enough acquainted with eggs that we want to meet their grown-up relative, the chicken. Across the way is Easy Rider, a restaurant that opened last year whose chef, Jared Rogers, specializes in Low-Country cuisine from Appalachia and the Carolinas.

We grab a seat at the bar, where our server presents us with a glassy vitrine covering a smoky plate of steak tartare with muffuletta olives, house steak sauce and… a country egg ($18). Can’t avoid them! Then comes a platter-for-two of fried chicken marinated in Frank’s RedHot and served with collard greens, bacon-topped mac ‘n’ cheese and a silver tureen of herby-white bacon gravy ($35.50).

The meat is supremely juicy under its crackling, salty, paper-thin crust. The gravy seems like a hat on a hat, but that’s Southern cooking – we dip everything into it, with no regrets.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Who knows: We’re just happy to enjoy it all here in the still-kicking poultry heartland of Petaluma.

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If You Go

Stellina Pronto: Open 6:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Wednesday-Monday at 23 Kentucky St., Petaluma; stellinapronto.com.

Petaluma Historical Library & Museum: Open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday-Sunday at 20 Fourth St., Petaluma; petalumamuseum.com.

Tenfold Farmstand: Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Sunday at 5300 Red Hill Road, Petaluma; tenfoldfarmstand.com.

Hicks Mountain Hens: 7590 Point Reyes-Petaluma Road, Novato; instagram.com/hicksmountainhens

Barber Lee Spirits: Open from 3 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday at 120 Washington St., Petaluma; barberleespirits.com.

Easy Rider: Open daily from 4:30 p.m. at 190 Kentucky St., Petaluma; easyriderpetaluma.com.