Fried Chicken Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  Appendix - Pecking Orders: Thoughts on Technique, Ingredients, Equipment & My ...

  Thanks

  About the Author

  The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The Publisher is not responsible for specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The Publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  a member of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2004 by John T. Edge

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

  or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

  permission. Please do not participate in or encourage

  piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the

  author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Photographs of Mattie Smith, Greenwood, Mississippi (p. viii),

  and of Jesse Clifton Evans Edge (p. 182) © Amy Evans

  Lyrics to “Fried Chicken and a Country Tune” (p. 65) by C. Harwell

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Edge, John T., date.

  Fried chicken : an American story / John T. Edge.

  p. cm.

  ISBN :978-1-4406-2756-9

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOR MY SON, JESSE CLIFTON EVANS EDGE. MAY YOU NEVER KNOW A MCNUGGET.

  it is possible that anyone claiming to be considered an educated gentleman may be thought to have done a bold thing in publishing a book on poultry, and giving his real name on the title page.

  Treatise on the History and Management of Ornamental and Domestic Poultry (1849)

  —REVEREND EDMUND SAUL DIXON

  Introduction

  This is the first in a series of books that celebrates America’s iconic foods. Fried chicken leads off, then in quick succession come apple pie, donuts, hamburgers & french fries. To my mind, these are democratic foods that conjure our collective childhood and call to mind the question once posed by a Chinese philosopher: “What is patriotism, but nostalgia for the foods of our youth?”

  I chose these foods because they transcend inter-regional variation and internecine debate over origins. Recognized from the Atlantic to the Pacific as uniquely American, they evoke the culinary and cultural fabric of our nation.

  Though the places profiled and the recipes detailed can be read as keys to eating well here in the States, my intent was not to compile a list of the country’s top spots. Instead, please consider this work to be my pilgrimage in search of America’s greasy grail. In this book and the ones that follow, I strive to introduce you to people and foods that, by virtue of their myriad ethnicities, by dint of their unvarnished honesty, comprise a tapestry of America.

  ONE

  Wherein I Argue for a New Theory of Fried Chicken

  fried chicken is best served without a side of provincial bluster. I trace that realization to an encounter with Jim Villas’s 1982 book, American Taste. The North Carolinian observed, “Let’s not beat around the bush for one second. To know about fried chicken, you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period.”

  As a fellow weaned and reared Southerner, I initially embraced Villas’s pronouncement. But more recently, while spending a year on the road in search of America by way of fried chicken, I’ve learned that Villas was wrong. Eating my way across the girth of our nation, I found much evidence to support the notion that, though the South has a long and distinguished history of fried chicken cookery, we have no lock on excellence.

  No palate can deny the appeal of the bread-crumb-coated chicken backs I gnawed in Barberton, Ohio; or the mojo-marinated breasts I devoured in Miami; or the cornmeal-crusted drumsticks I savored in Seattle. The notion that Southerners have an exclusive on fried chicken is attributable to an enduring phenomenon, the blind ascription to Southern distinctiveness. You know the routine: Summers are muggier, girls are prettier, dogs are lazier way down south in Dixie. A while back, I read an essay wherein an academic argues that the South is not necessarily richer in history or tradition or memories, but that owing to its peculiar past, the region plows more of its intellectual energy into telling tales that are at best playfully boastful, at worst, self-aggrandizing. Tales like, “To know about fried chicken, you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period.”

  I’m not one to abjure my native victuals. I own three cast-iron skillets. Each, by way of repeated use, is burnished black as Satan’s bung. I am adept at rendering lard, and I dote on the cracklings that sink to the bottom. I’ve yet to eat my fill of chicken fried in the Southern manner; I can hold forth with the best of my kinsmen as to proper preparation and consumption.

  But bad comes with good. As a Southerner, I also find it difficult to wash my palate clear of the bitter taint of racism. Herein, I pay homage to the region’s legendary fry cooks of African descent. To do so is to document the sad injustices of a Jim Crow South where blacks worked in white homes and businesses, wringing chicken necks and hefting skillets to stovetops, but were denied a place at the lunch counter, the dining room table.

  I tell some Southern stories in the pages that follow. But education is funny. Expose a boy to the wide world, and soon he develops a heretical idea or two. As in, “Fried chicken is not distinctly Southern; maybe it’s not even distinctly American.” Or, better yet, “If fried chicken is American, then it denotes an American identity that accommodates cooks from a plethora of traditions.”

  a case in point: Many of the cooks I’ve met lately have been recent immigrants who, intent upon assimilation, fry chicken in a conscious attempt to cook an iconically American dish. And yet, a glimmer of home oftentimes shines through. The effect is not diverting so much as it is mosaic-making. Legions of Korean entrepreneurs fit this pattern, including the interrelated Baltimore purveyors—at Lexington Fried Chicken, Park’s Fried Chicken, and Super Fried Chicken—who, in addition to fried breasts and wings and drumsticks, sell fried chicken necks and fried rice.

  Other entrepreneurs further complicate the equation. At New Caporal in New York City, Dominican fry cooks serve Cuban-inflected orange-garlic-and-lime-marinated chicken to a mostly African American clientele. Thirty blocks away at El Mundo, their countrymen dole out vinegar-marinated chicken to a mostly Dominican crowd that, for the most part, forsakes the chicken in favor of a smashed plantain and pork dish known as mofongo.

  spend a year eating fried chicken, inhaling fried chicken fumes day and night, and just at the point when you’re about to go bonkers, everything comes into focus. Somewhere along the way, maybe while munching a three-buck bag of chicharrones de pollo from El Mundo, I experienced such an epiphany. I had always known that, to understand chicken as fried in these United States, I would have to deal with more than the Southern question; I would have to contend with the matter of mystique. And in order to be well equipped to do so, I spent an inordinate amount of time collecting fried chicken lore.

  I
knew the basics: that the Depression-era Republican Party slogan “A chicken in every pot” was derivative of a pledge made by King Henri IV of France, who in the sixteenth century pronounced, “I hope to make France so prosperous that every peasant will have a chicken in his pot on Sundays.” And I knew that such statements packed wallops because, until the latter half of the twentieth century, chickens were expensive. That’s expensive as in costing more than beef, more than veal.

  I knew that the relatively sudden transition from luxury to commodity animated our conflicted love affair with fried chicken, that the transition could explain our tendency to sentimentalize the dish, to cloak it in family and home, though devotees are not above digging into an eight-piece box from Popeye’s. Therein I gleaned a defining paradox: Fried chicken is at once a totem of tradition and a lowest-common-denominator lunch.

  What’s more, fried chicken is the stuff of song, as in

  “Fried Chicken,” a single cut in 1957 by Hank Penny, that featured a song called “Rock of Gibraltar” on the B-side. Not to mention the musical stylings of a guitar virtuoso named Buckethead who won fame by wearing a KFC bucket for a crown and claiming that he was raised in a chicken coop. “One night, a guy threw a bucket of chicken into the coop,” a Buckethead spokesperson explained in a 1999 newspaper article. “Buckethead freaked out and tried to put the chickens back together. Then he stuck the bucket on his head. By doing that, he got the power of the dead chickens.”

  Fried chicken is also the stuff of pathos. “When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas,” wrote Maya Angelou in her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. “Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and father shipped us home to his mother. A [railroad] porter had been charged with our welfare . . . and our tickets were pinned to my brother’s inside coat pocket. I don’t remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up. Negro passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for the ‘poor, motherless darlings’ and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad.”

  Fried chicken is the stuff of tragicomedy. “Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant,” wrote Dick Gregory in his memoir Callus on My Soul. “This white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux, and Klan. They said, ‘Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin’. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.’

  “So I put down my knife and picked up that chicken and kissed it.”

  you may read the pages that follow in a couple of different ways. Read the following chapters as a social history of modern America told by way of fried chicken, and hopefully you won’t be disappointed. Or you might choose to eat your way through this text, to come to know the life stories of these American cooks by way of their good cooking, treating my observations as historical and cultural footnotes.

  Either way, you will learn, among other things, how to cook Italian fried chicken from a man born in India. You will make up your own mind about whether Kansas City can claim the title Pan-Fried Chicken Capital of America. You will taste Creole fried chicken in Louisiana, Buffalo fried chicken in upstate New York, and Latin fried chicken in California.

  The first half of the book is dedicated, in large part, to my search for fried chicken in the margins, but you will also come to know revered traditional cooks like Deacon Lyndell Burton of Atlanta, who operated one of the early integrated lunch spots in the city; Hattie Edwards of Gordonsville, Virginia, who perpetuated the local tradition of meeting train passengers with platters of chicken and sleeves of deviled eggs; and Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson of the Chalfonte Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, who, like their mother before them, claim more than fifty years at the stove.

  And if I do my job well, you may be compelled to turn to the rear of each chapter and cook your way through the representative recipes I assembled. Some are of my own divination, as the original recipes were secret. Others were generously offered. Either way, they are a tribute to the good people who invited me to sit down at their table and trusted me with their life stories.

  one more thing: You will find no nuggets here. No chicken fingers either. By my reckoning, fried chicken must have a bone. I have spent many hours contemplating the question of what qualifies as true fried chicken. My chosen place to ponder this matter was the Chevron mini-mart, three blocks from my home in Oxford, Mississippi. Contrary to what the cashier might have concluded, I was not wasting the night away, sipping absently from a cup of coffee, but formulating a theory of fried chicken that would exclude all manner of fused chicken parts.

  My neighborhood Chevron was the ideal laboratory. Though there are two other Chevrons in downtown Oxford, the one on my street corner is known as the Chicken-on-a-Stick Chevron because, soon after the bars close and the fraternity socials peter out, the undergraduate demimonde descends upon this mini-mart, in search of sustenance of the fowl sort: die-cut chicken parts, breaded and threaded on pointy wooden skewers, and deep-fried to a sandy brown. I have been known to stumble home from a night on the town, clutching a bagful to my breast. That said, I have come to the conclusion—after intensive and sober study—that, although it may well be a close relative, chicken-on-a-stick does not fried chicken make.

  Sure, one chicken-on-a-stick will take the edge off a six-pack buzz, but is it true fried chicken? Hardly. The presence of a bone in a piece of fried chicken is functionally and formally elemental. Without a bone, chicken lacks its savory essence, its primal, Henry VIII appeal. (The introduction of knives and forks to sixteenth-century Europe did not wholly sway lovers of poultry, who continue to savor birds out of hand.) And never mind the chicken-on-a-stick lovers who would argue that the wooden skewer serves as a proxy for a drumstick. By way of inelegant emulation, they prove my point.

  TWO

  Skillet Sisters of the Chalfonte Hotel

  in an effort to be true to my quest, regardless of relation to the line mapped by Mason and Dixon, our story begins in New Jersey, along the coast. Though the region appears to flourish, the true heyday hereabouts was the last half of the nineteenth century when this tongue of land, stretching southward from Atlantic City, was the playground of the elite and influential. Local wags like to say that Cape May, the village at the southernmost tip of the tongue, is America’s oldest seaside resort.

  Given half a chance they will tell you that President Abraham Lincoln made the journey to Cape May to escape the oppressive summer heat of miasmic Washington. One man, who misinterpreted my interest in local restaurant history to be applicable to all facets of Cape May lore, flagged me down in the parking lot of the visitor’s center to inform me that Henry Ford raced prototype autos on the beaches here, besting all comers until he lost to a man named Chevrolet. But I didn’t drive my rental car down from Newark to hear such stories. I came to eat fried chicken at the Chalfonte Hotel.

  I arrive at the inn—a clapboard dowager embellished with Romeo and Juliet balconies—armed with a modicum of information. I know that Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson, the Chalfonte’s long-tenured cooks, fry chicken in two gargantuan cast-iron skillets that are so large they accommodate twenty or thirty pieces at a time. And I soon come to know that locals like to tell tales about how those skillets have been in continual use since the days when Lincoln walked the beach.

  Before even unpacking, I make for the kitchen. It’s just past five on a summer afternoon, and, according to the desk clerk, “the ladies are pulling the last of the chicken from the skillets.” Once escorted into the presence of Dot and Lucille, I ask a silly question: “Why do people come to the Chalfonte?” (I have a stu
nning facility for insightful question-making.)

  Lucille laughs and turns the other way. Dot, who is spearing russet-hued pieces of chicken from a skillet the circumference of a manhole cover, looks me up and down and says, “Hell if I know. They don’t have air-conditioning, don’t have telephones or televisions in the little old rooms, and you have to walk down the hall just to use the bathroom.” And then, as an impish grin steals across her face, she allows, “It might have something to do with the food.”

  dot Burton and Lucille Thompson learned to cook at the hem of their mother, Helen Dickerson, who, at the age of four, began her seventy-seven years of service at the Chalfonte. Her first job was flower girl, charged with gathering daisies and jonquils for the dinner table. Like their mother before them, these women have spent the great majority of their working lives at the Chalfonte. Dot began her tenure at the age of nine, washing sand from bathing suits and hanging the cleaned garments on guest doorknobs. Lucille came into the fold soon after, and save a period in the 1970s when she moved upstate to Princeton in a successful search for a husband, has been right by her sister’s side.

  Tight nests of gray curls frame their round faces. Dot and Lucille wear matching chef’s whites, appreciate the balm of a good scotch, and share an unflagging devotion to the midday soap Guiding Light. You get the impression they might be twins, though Dot is seventy-six, Lucille seventy-five. They are both quick to laugh, and when they do, they cackle like schoolgirls. Among curators of Chalfonte lore, however, they are both considered more reserved than their mother: In her later years, Helen Dickerson took to holding court at a prep table, wagging her knife at passersby. If you dared enter the kitchen without greeting her by name, she was likely to fix you with an earnest gaze and ask, “Did I sleep with you last night?”