Robert C. Baker, 84; Poultry Innovator

Normally the idea of a chicken barbecue before a memorial service might raise some eyebrows. But in the case of Robert C. Baker, who pioneered changes in American cuisine with his poultry innovations, the barbecue would seem more than appropriate.

Baker, 84, died of a heart attack Monday at his home in North Lansing, N.Y.

A longtime professor of food science and poultry science at Cornell University, Baker created dozens of products, including ground poultry, chicken nuggets, turkey ham and poultry hot dogs.

“When the nuggets came out in the 1950s, they weren’t too popular,” Baker told the Ithaca Journal in 2004.

His variations on chicken eventually caught on, particularly his nuggets, which have become a mainstay of fast-food joints. In upstate New York, his chicken barbecue recipe has become a Cornell icon. Baker always had a stand at the New York State Fair, and the university said President Clinton and his family asked for his chicken barbecue during their visit in 1999.

Raised in Newark, N.Y., Baker worked on his father’s fruit farm. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell’s College of Agriculture in 1943, then obtained a master’s degree from Penn State University and a doctorate from Purdue University.

While teaching at Penn State just after World War II, Baker suggested a chicken barbecue for the governor of Pennsylvania, who was coming for a visit. “We dug a trench and put steel pipes in the ground,” to hold the chicken racks, he told a reporter from Newsday, “and we bent down to turn the chicken.”

Baker recalled that the guests at the barbecue loved the chicken but the cooks felt lukewarm about stooping over a pit turning chicken pieces for the better part of an afternoon.

When Baker moved to Cornell in 1949, he took his recipe for chicken barbecue sauce with him.

He also was the co-author of a small but influential pamphlet called “Barbecued Chicken” that was first published in 1950 and was reprinted in 1956 and 1960. The basic cooking formula was expanded to include other poultry. He also developed above-ground cooking pits that saved many aching backs.

In his day job at Cornell, he founded the university’s Institute of Food Science and Marketing in 1970. He retired in 1989 and went back to the farm, but not to tend chickens.

A member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame, he owned an orchard near Ithaca, N.Y., with his wife Jacoba.

“He really -- in more ways than most ever will -- changed things,” his son Dale Baker told The Ithaca Journal on Tuesday. “He changed the way we eat.”

In addition to his son Dale, he is survived by his wife and five other children.

Saturday’s memorial service for Baker will be at 7 p.m. at the Middle School Auditorium in Lansing, N.Y. The pre-service chicken barbecue will be held at the Lansing Methodist Church.