Unlike large animals such as cows or deer, small animals such as chickens, rabbits, and ducks can be cooked whole, meaning that before they go into the oven they have a “hollow” where their innards once were that can be filled with stuffing or forcemeat. These small, “hollow” animals were not originally sold by butchers, who specialized only in the large animals that had to be cut into manageable sizes; accordingly, the term hollow meat emerged as a generic name for meats not sold in butcher shops. The term hollow meat was first used in the late nineteenth century, but the word hollow itself is much older, going back to the mid thirteenth century. Hollow derives from an Indo-European source that meant to hide; from this source also developed the words hell (a place where the Almighty hides the sinful from His sight), hall (a place where Anglo-Saxons once gathered to hide from fiends such as Beowulf’s Grendel), helmut (a covering that hides your head), and of course hole.