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Food and Drink

29th Nov 2022

‘Bachelor’s handbag’ voted as new word of the year in Australia

Fiona Frawley

shelves of bagged rotisserie chickens in a supermarket

This isn’t a sentence I thought I’d ever type, but it’s been a big year for rotisserie chicken news.

First, there was the man in Philadelphia who ate a full rotisserie chicken every day for 40 days.

Now, ‘bachelor’s handbag’, a term of endearment for a supermarket rotisserie chuck has been named the Australian people’s choice as the new word of the year, as per the Macquarie Dictionary.

The dictionary said that Australians voted ‘in droves’ to place the term at the top spot, adding that it was ‘quintessentially Australian’ and summed up the role of a rotisserie bird perfectly.

They define the term as:

Noun colloquial (humorous) a takeaway roast chicken. [From the fact that such a chicken requires no further preparation before consumption, so is seen as an easy meal favoured by a single person, and that is often packaged in a small plastic bag with a handle, resembling a handbag].

The term also recently enjoyed a shoutout on new podcast Emer and Esther’s Sunday Roast (a podcast rating and reviewing carvery lunches in Dublin and beyond – anyone serious about chicken, or any other roast-able animals for that matter, should be listening).

Host Emer said of the term:

Have you ever heard a rotisserie chicken being called a bachelors handbag?

Bachelors, or single men used to just buy rotisserie chickens and eat them, and they’d be there swinging their little bag.

So there you go. Next time we see a man leaving a supermarket with his bagged chicken in one hand and a baguette that’d feed a family of four in the other we’ll salute him, for his services to roast poultry in Ireland, Australia and beyond.

Header image via Shutterstock 

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