Fried Chicken Read online

  Deep South Deacon-Fried Chicken

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  Deacon Burton was a minimalist. I don’t suppose he would have approved of my use of thyme. His spice cabinet was bare except for a tin of black pepper, a box of salt. But I am a mere mortal, not able to coax from chicken the stupendous flavor for which the Deacon was known. Herewith, my tribute to the Deacon, my heretical stab at transcendence.

  ■ 1 chicken weighing 3 to 4 pounds (the

  smaller, the better), cut into 8-10 pieces

  ■ 8 teaspoons salt

  ■ 1 quart cold water

  ■ 4 teaspoons black pepper

  ■ 4 teaspoons thyme

  ■ 1 cup self-rising flour

  ■ Lard, or shortening into which you mix

  about 3 tablespoons bacon grease

  Dissolve 4 teaspoons of the salt in the cold water and soak chicken in water for 1 hour. Drain and then pat almost dry. Season chicken with 2 teaspoons each of the (continued) salt and pepper, and 2 teaspoons of the thyme. Mix flour and remaining 2 teaspoons each of the salt, pepper, and thyme in a heavy paper or plastic bag. Add a couple of pieces of chicken at a time, shake to coat thoroughly, and shake again upon removal to loosen excess flour. Remove floured chicken to a wax-paper- or parchment-lined pan. Refrigerate if you plan to wait more than 10 minutes to fry.

  Heat lard or shortening over medium-high in a cast-iron skillet, to reach a depth of 1½ inches when liquefied. When the liquid reaches 350°, slip the dark meat in, skin-side down, followed by the white meat. Keep the lard or shortening between 300° and 325° and cook each side for 5-6 minutes covered and then 5-6 minutes uncovered, for a total of 20-24 minutes, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white meat. Drain on a wire rack, blotting with paper towels as necessary. Serves 3 or 4.

  It Takes a Village to Fry a Chicken

  i have long been fascinated by the shoebox lunch, a traveler’s repast assembled in a box that once contained high heels with grosgrain bows or brogans studded with brass eyelets. As constructed by a mother, an aunt, or a family cook, it might hold a fried chicken leg, a half-sandwich of pimento cheese on crustless white, a couple of deviled eggs tucked in a sleeve of wax paper. And, secreted away from the prying eyes and appetites of neighbors, it might even include a slice of red velvet cake slicked with cream cheese icing.

  Until recently, as a self-aware and somewhat defensive native of the South, I thought of shoebox lunches as harbingers of the bad ol’ days. They conjured a time when laws and customs complicated a trip of any distance in the Jim Crow South, dictating that black citizens could not eat alongside white. But, in the story that follows, the story of the railroad cooks of Gordonsville, Virginia, I found a story of black and white interaction and eating on the go in which I might eke out a measure of pride.

  TEN

  The Chicken Bone Express

  the creosote-swabbed timbers of the CSX rail trestle loom large at a bend in the road leading into Gordonsville, Virginia, a small town twenty-five miles north of Charlottesville. Even today, the sight and sound of a locomotive heaving up and over the trestle, skirting town at rooftop height, commands attention. The brute force of the engine calls to mind the days when Gordonsville was the junction of the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Orange, Alexandria & Manassas.

  Catercorner from the trestle is an abandoned freight depot. Beyond that is the two-story clapboard Exchange Hotel, commandeered as a Confederate hospital during the Civil War and now home to a museum dedicated to the late unpleasantness. Across the way—and of greatest import for the purposes of my fried chicken quest—is the onetime site of Gordonsville’s passenger station. That’s where, from the mid-1800s until at least the 1930s, African American women peddled food to travelers whose trains stopped here to take on water and coal.

  Gordonsville was not the sole town that fostered such entrepreneurial activity. Natives of Corinth, a onetime railroad town in northeastern Mississippi, tell tales of Julia Brown, who in 1867—just two years after gaining status as a freed-woman—began meeting trains at the depot, selling drumsticks and wings. Ditto long-tenured residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who speak fondly of the kerchiefed women who greeted new arrivals at Reading Terminal with baskets of tissue-wrapped thighs priced at a nickel per piece.

  These women came of age when rail lines had not yet adopted the niceties of service that came to define mid-twentieth-century travel. There were no Pullman car berths for overnight passage. No dining cars boasted tables napped with linen and set with crystal and china. Instead, as Barbara Haber revealed in her recent book From Hardtack to Home Fries, in 1857 The New York Times reported that many travelers endured long days, with “hot cinders flying in their faces” before approaching a station “dying with weariness, hunger, and thirst, longing for an opportunity to bathe their faces at least before partaking of their much-needed refreshments. . . . The consequence of such savage and unnatural feeding are not reported by telegraph as railroad disasters; but if a faithful account were taken of them we are afraid they would be found much more serious than any that are caused by the smashing of cars, or the breaking of bridges.”

  The African American women of Gordonsville were among the first entrepreneurs to define and satisfy the nutritional needs of travelers. Without a doubt, thousands of other women, in hundreds of other towns, tried their hand at the same. (My colleague Psyche Williams-Forson has written a dissertation on the subject of black women and chicken, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs.) But a peculiar confluence of capitalistic hustle, booming rail traffic, and proximity to the media outlets of nearby Washington, D.C., gave rise to Gordonsville’s unmatched reputation for poultry cookery. Indeed, by 1869, essayist George W. Bagby was calling the town “the chicken-leg centre of the universe.” It was a title to which the city would lay claim long after the last Gordonsville train boarded passengers.

  visiting Gordonsville, I take stock of the legacy of those cooks, talking to their descendants and admirers. Key to my visit is the afternoon I pass in the company of octogenari-to ans Mildred and Pete Avery. Mr. Avery’s mother, Elsie Swift, and her sister, Mamie Swift, were veterans of the local fried chicken trade, and were, along with their fellow townspeople, known as waiter-carriers. The moniker may have come from their practice of carrying trays of chicken and pie and coffee from their homes to the train platform where they would wait on passengers.

  Over the course of the afternoon, I learn much about the idea of waiter-carriers. I begin to understand that the frying of chicken was a step toward independence for African American women during the dark days when labor and the products of labor were the property of slaveholders. Talking with Pete—who recalls plucking the chickens his mother and aunt killed and scalded—I realize that these women were employing a sort of vertical business integration, raising fryers from chicks, feeding them out to a weight of two or three pounds, and then cooking them and serving them to travelers. It was an early and important underground economy that leveraged self-reliance and rewarded its practitioners with an independence that many of their sharecropping husbands could not muster.

  Pete tells me of the seemingly superhuman strength of those waiter-carriers. They were able, he says, to muscle a tray stacked with baskets of fried chicken and pots of coffee above their heads, to carry them from home kitchens to the station. They would heft them again when a train arrived, so that customers leaning from passenger coach windows might reach down and serve themselves. When I hear Pete talk of the beautiful dresses the women wore beneath their starched white aprons, and the multicolored hats they donned to cover bandanna-clad heads, I imagine a band of regal women in whom the whole community might take great pride.

  When Pete describes the preparation of chicken—how the birds benefited from two soaks in salted water and how the women battered them with water and flour and fried them in locally rendered lard—my mouth waters for a taste of bird as prepared in the Gordonsville style. But luck is not with
me. It seems that the last of the businesses connected to the trade, Hattie’s Inn, closed a while back. And while Pete’s wife, Mildred, does fry chicken in the traditional Gordonsville manner, she does so—on order from Pete’s doctor—just one day a week. Since that day is Wednesday and my audience with the Avery family takes place on a Thursday, I am, for the moment, out of luck. (I did, upon returning home, develop a Gordonsville style recipe based on Pete’s description and a few tricks of my own; turn to page 104.)

  i don’t know why no progeny came forward to carry on the tradition, after the Swift family stowed their trays, when Hattie closed her doors. (I am reminded again of Calvin Trillin’s observation that “a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman . . . it is not easily passed down intact.”) When I query Pete, he just mumbles about changing times. He is similarly inscrutable when I ask why the Gordonsville Fried Chicken Festival, established in June of 2001, has failed to garner strong support from the local African American community.

  But after pondering these developments for a while, I believe I may have tentative answers. The matter of the annual festival is simplest. Some locals see it as a grand ruse staged to ferret out the fried chicken recipes perfected long ago by the waiter-carriers. That may be a bit harsh, but, to my mind, the festival—driven by tourism funds and executed by the local visitors’ bureau—fails to pay appropriate homage to the waiter-carriers. Maybe before you can pay tribute to these women, you must first acknowledge that they thrived at the margins, beyond the gaze of the city fathers, taking pride in a sort of renegade capitalism that was quite the opposite of a city-sponsored event.

  This distrust of officialdom is deep-rooted. Many have posited that the waiter-carriers met their demise as trains modernized, first adding dining cars, then closing carriages and restricting easy passenger access to the foods vended by the women, and finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, introducing air-conditioning and sealing the carriages. But there are others who believe that the real culprits were local laws and sanctions that appear on the books as early as 1879, when the city fathers began to grasp the impact of the waiter-carriers, and the town council began requiring snack vendors’ licenses, and collecting a tax thereon.

  This alternate explanation gains strength when I find a 1970 interview from the local newspaper with Bella Watson, described as the sole surviving waiter-carrier. The article refers obliquely to early struggles for vending franchises that exiled waiter-carriers to the opposite side of the tracks from the platform. The eighty-year-old does not mince words about the end of the era. “There was a health officer from Richmond,” she recalls. “I still remember his name, but I won’t say it. [He] used to make me so mad that sometimes I would cuss and sometimes I would cry. They made us wrap our chicken in oilpaper and even wanted to see where we cooked it. Of course, we had our secret ways of cooking that chicken and I believe he just wanted to find that out.”

  A cynic might say that little has changed in the intervening thirty-odd years: the powers that be still want that recipe. But I’m not quite that cynical. On the contrary, it seems good—even just—that fifty years after the era of the waiter-carriers has passed, the fried chicken recipes perfected by those early entrepreneurs are still in demand. I find hope in the knowledge that a new generation of Virginians considers such treasures to be matters of private concern, of family dowry, known only to women like Mildred Avery.

  Trackside Fried Chicken Destined for a Shoebox Lunch

  GORDONSVILLE, VIRGINIA

  Battered chicken has long been popular south of the Mason-Dixon, and this is my recipe inspired by the waiter-carriers of Gordonsville, Virginia. Try it hot from the skillet, or cooled to room temperature and ferried to a picnic table by a basket or a shoebox. Better yet, eat the first batch, and then fry a second batch to eat cold, after an overnight in the fridge.

  ■ 1 chicken weighing 3 to 4 pounds (the

  smaller, the better), cut into 8-10 pieces

  ■ 1½ cups all-purpose flour

  ■ 1 tablespoon salt

  ■ 1 tablespoon black pepper

  ■ 1 tablespoon paprika

  ■ 2 tablespoons ground sage

  ■ 2 cups 2% milk

  ■ 1 egg, beaten

  ■ Peanut oil into which you mix about

  3 tablespoons bacon grease

  Combine 1 cup of the flour, the salt, pepper, paprika, and 1 tablespoon of the sage in a bowl. Stir in milk and beaten egg to make a thin batter. Roll chicken in remaining flour. Dip chicken into batter one piece at a time. Shake off excess batter. Place chicken on wire rack and let stand in refrigerator for 15 minutes. Heat oil, at a depth of 3 inches, to 350°. Add chicken skin-side down, and cook uncovered at 325° for 8-12 minutes per side, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white meat. Drain on wire rack. Sprinkle with remaining sage. Serves 4.

  Good Preacher Gone Bad

  fried chicken eating and churchgoing are long intertwined. I uncovered three examples of the synergy while on the research trail:■ At the Whole Truth Church and Lunchroom, a church-run enterprise in Wilson, North Carolina, funds are raised from the sale of fried chicken and collard greens. The money pays for the closed-circuit audio broadcasts that beam in the good word of the reigning bishop in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith.

  ■ Given an audience with a good sense of humor and an appreciation of liturgical pomp, you can make the case that the beauty of a golden breast of fried chicken emerging from the depths of a pot burbling with oil has its roots in the Pentecostal tendency to dismiss a baptismal sprinkle in favor of full immersion.

  ■ And for the purposes of advancing this narrative, you should know that, at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in New Alsace, Indiana, annual fried chicken dinners (an account of which follows) replenish the congregation’s coffers and foster fellowship that envelops the whole of the community.

  But keep in mind that the relationship between church and chicken also has its downside. Psyche Williams-Forson once told me that there are four things that can bring a preacher down. She calls them the four C’s: cash, chicks, Cadillacs, and chicken. Fried chicken, to be specific. Too much praise of one sister’s cooking tells the congregation that the preacher is availing himself of more than her gospel bird.

  ELEVEN

  Chasing Chicken on a Slow Time Sunday Morning

  it’s just past nine on a Sunday morning when I roll into the burg of New Alsace, Indiana. The drive west from Cincinnati, Ohio, took less than an hour, but the change is remarkable. After threading my way through strip malls and burger boxes, the Indiana countryside is a balm. As the highway narrows to two lanes, roadside billboards advertising discount denture fabricators give way, and plywood signs tacked to fence posts emerge, heralding a community quilt sale, an antique tractor show.

  Even the telling of time is different here. While the great majority of the country adheres to Daylight Saving Time, the rural precincts of Indiana, in deference to farmers who start their workday early, do not fiddle with their clocks. They prefer instead to hold steady year-round to what they call slow time.

  I arrive intent upon surveying the Catholic-parish chicken dinners staged throughout the Midwest. From what I was able to glean before I hit the road, Ohio and contiguous states appear to be at the epicenter of the phenomenon. Beginning in May and continuing through early November, more than fifty churches in the three-state region host dinners. Traditionally, the source for a roster of dates and churches was word of mouth or an advertisement in the Catholic Telegraph Register, but, as with all aspects of modern American life, the Internet has recently made inroads. Since 1996, fried chicken devotee Carl Heilmann of the University of Cincinnati has operated a web database of dinners, www.thinkingchicken.com.

  With Carl’s help, I chose the second weekend in August for my expedition, because, with a good map and a bit of dispatch, I might be able to sample three dinners in thre
e different states in one day. The plan we devised was that I would hit New Alsace early, then forge on to parishes in Ohio and Kentucky. Even though I would eventually succeed in my three-part quest, I knew as I drove through the rutted field alongside St. Paul’s burying ground that I could curtail my investigations and be utterly content at New Alsace. I had a feeling, as the soaring brick sanctuary came into view, that the food would prove to be that good, the community bonds that compelling.

  two hours before the first chicken dinner is served at eleven a.m., the St. Paul church grounds are already abuzz with activity. Out front, beneath a tent on loan from an undertaker, a clutch of men hunches over an oversized gaming wheel, making adjustments to ensure a proper advantage for the house. One tent over, a teenage girl counts out raffle tickets that entitle winners to a slab of bacon or a rosy ham.

  Around back, a crew of three women staffs a country store. There you can purchase a pair of Wolverine boots from which sprout entangled tendrils of wandering Jew, as well as ingots of zucchini-pineapple-walnut bread, sealed in rose-tinted plastic wrap. Beneath the boughs of an elm tree, a middle-aged woman in a smock shoves a chair into place for her husband, the dealer who will preside over a church-sponsored game of what is known locally as giant poker. Soon he will slide legal-pad-sized cards to beer-drinking players with a quarter or three riding on each hand.