Fried Chicken Read online

  As a son of the Protestant South, raised in proximity to all manner of Baptists, these vignettes of Catholic parish life confound me. But they don’t scare me. On the contrary, after enduring years of punch-and-cookie socials, I may have found my people.

  in the kitchen, beneath the adjacent schoolhouse, I meet eighty-something-year-old Tillie Hoffbauer, whose smiling face is framed by a cumulus of white curls. Though my goal is to get a bead on the fried chicken cooking tradition hereabouts, and I know that Tillie’s expertise is in the preparation of dressing, I can’t resist an audience with her. I’m rewarded with an early morning taste of that dressing, rich with stock made from chicken necks and stoked with bounteous quantities of week-old white bread.

  The dressing does not disappoint. And neither does the mock turtle soup or the fried chicken livers I sample from the cook tent pitched just beyond her kitchen door. But I keep my appetite in check. The crew of fry cooks are setting up their kettles beyond the blacktop parking lot, beneath a tight arbor of oak trees. I hope to be able to both eat my fill and come to know how and why the tradition of parish picnics has thrived in New Alsace since at least the 1890s.

  For a good fifteen minutes I amble about, introducing myself to any of the twenty-odd cooks who will meet my gaze and suffer my queries. Then I latch on to Jim Sublett, a craggy-faced tool-and-die maker from nearby Cedar Grove. Jim and his son Don work a fryer crafted from an old cast-iron wash pot, sheathed in an insulating jacket of castoff piping, and fired by a burner salvaged from a household furnace.

  When I ask Jim about the history of St. Paul’s chicken dinner feed, he stops me midsentence. “I’m not a member of this church,” he says above the throaty hiss of the oil-filled kettles. “I’m not even Catholic. We just come to hang out with the cooks and do our part. We fry at four of these dinners every summer; for the fire department, for the Catholics, it’s all the same to us.”

  Jim’s comments prove to be a recurring theme of my New Alsace explorations. These people are not grandstanders. Here, the doing of good deeds is considered a privilege, not a duty. That is not to say that they are saints-in-training: One of the cooks, a barrel-gutted man in his late twenties, wearing a T-shirt that advertises his prowess in horseshoe tossing, seems still drunk from the night before. When he lurches hard against a tree while dropping a load of chicken into his kettle, a fellow cook hands him a beer in an attempt to restore his liquid equilibrium.

  before the morning is over and the wait to gain admittance to the gymnasium-cum-dining-room swells to more than an hour, I buy a ticket and take a seat at one of the folding tables arranged, with military precision, on the basketball court. While seated, I eat a surfeit of fried chicken hemmed in a pepper-flecked parchment of crust. I inhale a thatch of bacon-napped coleslaw. I nibble at mashed potatoes that began the day as a mound of dehydrated flakes. I blanket Tillie’s dressing in a gush of cracklin’-studded gravy and dig my fork deep.

  I even have the opportunity to engage table captain Donna Huff, who has served here for thirty-seven consecutive years. Her great-great-grandfather’s niece—whose name Donna cannot recall but a historian of New Alsace records as Mary Even—was one of the originators of the tradition. As Donna mediates squabbles over a dwindling supply of pineapple upside-down cake, she tells me that the annual dinner now draws more than two thousand people and nets the church tens of thousands of dollars. This big event had its beginnings in the ice cream social craze of the Victorian era. Mary Even organized socials to raise money for the church; she and her sisters and cousins solicited buckets of cream from local dairy farmers, and blocks of ice from local saloons, to make the confection.

  When I’m done, I pine for a return to the cook tents. Word has it that, after three or four batches of chicken, the oil becomes impregnated with sufficient schmaltz and salt and pepper to render a product that far surpasses what I ate during my early luncheon.

  Jim Sublett is where I left him, perched over a kettle of chicken. Above him floats a nimbus of grease and steam. Arrayed behind him, in front of him, are twenty-six other kettles. St. Joseph’s parishioners tend some. Community volunteers like Jim and Don tend others. All appreciate the camaraderie and the chance to snack on fried gizzards or sneak a pinch from the plastic tubs of Tillie’s dressing which, every half-hour or so, a young boy lugs from the kitchen and hefts onto a makeshift buffet fashioned from a stump, a chair bottom, a cooler.

  When, after fifteen minutes or so of immersion, Jim’s chicken bobs to the surface, he scoops the sandy-brown pieces from the kettle, and, after a brief shake, deposits the chicken in a speckle-ware dishpan at his feet. Soon, a runner will come by to ferry his birds into the dining room. While he waits, Jim dips into the burbling grease for any cracklin’s that might burn and render his oil acrid.

  He drops the nuggets of fused chicken fat into an oversized tin can, which a second team of runners will eventually empty for use in the gravy. I watch his progress, waiting for the moment when the cracklin’s have cooled enough to palm. By this time, I have commandeered the makings of a fine midday snack: a paper plate heaped with dressing, a brace of deep-fried gizzards, and an ice-cold Old Style beer snagged from a fellow fryer’s cooler.

  In the distance, I can hear the trill of a toy train whistle, the clack of the betting wheel, the splinter-voiced call of teenage boys hawking raffle tickets for baby blankets and twenty-five-dollar savings bonds. I settle into a squat alongside Jim’s fryer and scoop a ragged hunk of dressing from my plate, which now rests on a patch of grease-soaked ground. Jim pulls another load from the fryer and asks me to mind his gear while he takes a bathroom break. I nod, and in so doing, take my first, tentative step from interloper to acolyte in the brotherhood of fry cooks.

  Fried Chicken Cooked in the Great Out-of-Doors

  no recipe follows this chapter because, in large part, the secret to St. Paul’s fried chicken has less to do with recipe and technique and more to do with where the chicken is cooked: out of doors.

  Though you can buy a ready-made kit of the type marketed for crawfish boils and turkey fries, I recommend a homegrown rig much like the one Jim Sublett uses: a propane-fueled fryer set within a cast-iron sleeve. Mine is of sufficient circumference that when I heft up my cast-iron washpot (a flea-market prize) it cradles within quite snugly. Equipped with an oversized seine purchased at a restaurant supply house and four quarts of peanut oil, I’m ready to tackle any of these recipes that call for deep frying.

  And my wife appreciates the fact that the oil perfumes our backyard instead of our kitchen.

  Chicken Little

  chicken wings came to the fore in the 1980s. Their arrival at corner taverns and national chain eateries compelled a reexamination of the anatomical composition of what zoologists know as Gallus domesticus.

  It was a transitional time in the evolution of chicken terminology. The popularity of wishbones—known more often in rural areas as pulleybones, dubbed merrythoughts in England—was on the wane (though the term had yet to be resigned to recognition as a brand of salad dressing or an offensive football formation). For the record, the wishbone is the forked structure in front of the chicken’s breastbone, formed by the fusion of the clavicles. According to widely embraced superstition, when two people tug at the ends of a wishbone, the person who retains the longer piece is granted a wish.

  But enough of the old lingo. Buffalo chicken wings demanded the dissemination of new terms: tips, flats, and drums. Soon we knew that the proper preparation of chicken wings called for the cook to snip off the tips and cut the remaining wings into meager-fleshed flats (comprising the ulna and radius) and drums (the meaty humerus). Even if we did not immediately warm to the new terminology, we learned that a flat didn’t taste fine unless you fried it to a crisp, lavished it with hot sauce, and dragged it through a cup of blue cheese dressing.

  TWELVE

  On the Wings of Mother Teressa

  buffalo, New York, is a drinking man’s town. And, despite what detracto
rs will tell you about the year-round threat of blizzards at this outpost on the Canadian border, ice-cold beer seems to be the preferred drink of most Buffalo men. In preparation for my summer sojourn there, I read a number of texts, including Dale Anderson and Bob Riley’s opus A Beer Drinker’s Guide to Buffalo Bars; Verlyn Klinkenborg’s homage to his father-in-law’s Buffalo tavern, The Last Fine Time; and, more to the point, Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker essay “An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing.”

  To further get myself in the proper frame of mind, I read each while seated at a bar near my Oxford, Mississippi, home, swilling drafts and snarfing down wing after spicy wing. I ate the chicken in a rather halfhearted stab at research, while I drank the beer to cool the fire and brighten my mood; for I did not begin my examination of Buffalo chicken wings eagerly.

  I tried my best to avoid the subject of Buffalo chicken wings. I even pondered a polemic in favor of restoring the beef-on-weck sandwich to its rightful stature as the region’s signature food. The genesis of my plaint was multifaceted. Blame media and menu saturation. Blame my tendency to embrace the singular, the fleeting: to deify the whale-blubber-fried chicken that I have not yet tasted but have heard tell is cooked on the occasion of a full moon, on an oil derrick that straddles the Bering Strait.

  But how could I deny that, based upon the parameters set for this book, Buffalo wings are an iconic example of fried chicken? They have a bone. (Flats even have two.) They attain their crunch by way of immersion in roiling oil. And a hell of a lot of people know them as the quintessential bar food.

  so it is that I find myself in Buffalo, thinking big thoughts like, Who has the right to declare any city to be a capital of anything? By my reckoning, it’s an enterprise best left to historians backed by a retinue of fierce graduate students, chamber of commerce types absent any sense of propriety, or interlopers like me equipped with nothing save a bit of perspective. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that, thirty minutes into my Buffalo expedition, I make the bold decision to enshrine this post-industrial city—along with Nashville, Tennessee, and Kansas City, Missouri (about which you will learn more in succeeding chapters)—in my pantheon of fried chicken capitals.

  This insight comes to me as I pilot my rental car down a wide Buffalo boulevard, alternately digging into a box of medium-hot wings and wiping excess sauce on my jeans. I pass Duff’s, a onetime Mexican restaurant that switched over from tacos to wings long ago; two Chinese buffeterias that boast strong sub-specialties in teriyaki and barbecue wings; a sandwich shop that, based upon the special that blinks forth from tonight’s menu board, may well do the same; and a hospital which, in seeming anticipation of the dawning of the age of the Buffalo chicken wing, installed the first cardiac pacemaker implant in 1960.

  When I stop at a traffic light, a Ford with a Domino’s Pizza sign fixed to the roof pulls alongside. It is driven by a kid who—and I swear this is gospel—flicks a wing out his window, watches as it bounces off the blacktop, dabs sauce from his lips with the sleeve of his uniform, and, as the light changes to green, speeds away. Soon after I recover enough to proceed, I look up to see a restaurant sign looming in the distance. The place is called Just Pizza, but even these good folks can’t leave well enough alone. According to the advertisements blazoned on the front window, they sell wings too.

  By the time I reach the Anchor Bar, I have passed more than a dozen chicken wing vendors. I stopped at three, of which Duff’s is my current favorite, if only because they are generous with their blue cheese dressing. I remind myself that I have much further to go, that I’m only at the Anchor Bar to set a sort of baseline for my study of Buffalo wings. But two steps into the vestibule and I’m a goner. Truth be told, I am predisposed to like any place that stakes its reputation for great music on the vocal stylings of a woman named Miss Dodo Greene. What’s more, I did not anticipate the import of treading the same duckboards where a dish was conceived.

  Imagine finding the first baker of apple pie. She’s been dead for centuries. How about the first cook to stuff a broiled meat patty between two slices of bread? True believers will still be squabbling over the inventor of the hamburger when the Southern Baptist Convention elects its first openly gay leader. But here, at the 1940 vintage Anchor Bar, a vaguely Italianate warehouse on a forlorn street south of downtown, one can pull up a stool, order a beer, and pay homage to the maker amidst the trappings of a true cathedral of creation.

  i did not arrive in Buffalo unawares. My readings, and forty years of pop acculturation, had equipped me with the basics, the tenets of the chicken wing catechism as handed down by the Bellissimo family, longtime proprietors of the Anchor Bar. I knew that, among aficionados, there is little to no squabbling over the year, 1964, in which Buffalo chicken wings were conceived. But I also knew that devotees tell a number of contradictory stories of the evening in question. The two most often cited are these:■ Teressa Bellissimo invented Buffalo chicken wings when her son Dominic and a cadre of friends came by the bar in search of a late-night snack. Teressa rescued a mess of wings intended for the stockpot, cut them in half, cooked them to a crisp, and sprinkled the wings with hot sauce before serving them with a bowl of blue cheese dressing and a few strips of celery swiped from an antipasto platter.

  ■ The impetus was the Catholic prohibition against eating meat on Friday. As the clock inched toward midnight on a Friday, Dominic asked his mother to prepare something special for the Saturday-morning revelers. Again she crisped said wings and swiped said celery and added a monkey bowl of blue cheese for good measure.

  I also knew that there exists an heretical story that does not involve Teressa Bellissimo. Among certain hard-shell Anchor Bar devotees, the claim of primacy by John Young, onetime proprietor of a Buffalo take-away shop called Wings ’n’ Things, stirs the same sort of ire that tales of Sally Hemings’s lineage precipitate among myopic descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

  Many serious eaters dismiss his claim when they learn that Young neither clipped nor disjointed his wings, that he had the audacity to batter them before frying, and that his hot sauce (known to patrons as mambo sauce) was based upon a honey-mustard-cayenne mix instead of a margarine-cayenne blend. Those inconsistencies did not stop me, however, from driving seventy-five miles from Buffalo to Rochester, searching for an analogue to Wings ’n’ Things in the locally revered mini-chain known as Sal’s Birdland. What’s more, Young’s tale later compelled a visit to Washington, D.C., where Buffalo newspaperwoman Janice Okun reported that Young got the idea for mambo sauce. To this day, D.C. take-aways like Yum’s serve mambo-drenched wings to the demimonde. But I digressed then, and I digress now.

  the decor of the Anchor Bar calls to mind an AntiquesRoadshow prop room overseen by a drunk with impeccable taste in late-twentieth-century detritus. Unlike bars where the manager hangs a red wagon and a rusted Coca-Cola sign from the ceiling in an attempt to create what his franchise manual terms “a mood,” the Anchor Bar comes by it honestly with castoff softball trophies, Statue of Liberty sculptures, crab traps, and out-of-state license plates.

  Ivano Toscano occupies a stool in the corner. He is a pug of a man, a first-generation immigrant who was born in Italy and made his way here after falling for a Yugoslavian beauty he met at a nudist beach. Ivano wears a watch fashioned from gold nuggets; his shirt pocket sports a cellophane-wrapped cigar. With the death of Frank and Teressa Bellisimo and the retirement of subsequent Anchor Bar scions, he is the majordomo of wingdom.

  We shake hands, and I brace for the onslaught. I expect Ivano to loose a harangue on the virtues of Anchor Bar chicken wings. But he is mercifully free of any predilection to speechify, and I don’t risk my luck by prodding.

  Instead, I follow his lead and order a beer. And then another. We talk of chicken wings now and again, but we also talk of politics and women and baseball. It’s late afternoon, and the pace of the bar quickens. Ivano watches the door, and I watch the crowd, my eyes alert, my pen at the rea
dy. I’m intent upon recording for posterity one of those vignettes which, in the retelling, allow a writer to encapsulate the whole of an experience.

  No such vignettes present themselves. I order a basket of hot wings. And I ponder a number of questions: Is this the first food of mass appeal invented in the television age? Is this the sole dish of the twentieth century that has its origins in offal? But I do not break the spell by asking these questions of Ivan. Instead, I eat my basket of hot wings. The vapors swirling upward from the pile tickle and then inflame my nostrils. The wings taste no better, no worse, than any of the others I will eat over the next few days.

  Ivano and I order another beer. High on the barback, I spy a miniature chicken bucket filled with the plastic chits and playing cards necessary to play a round of what was once heralded as the country’s newest game sensation, the Buffalo-Style Chicken Game. Behind me, I hear one fellow exclaim to his barmate, “Hey, that guy has a pad and pen—I wonder if he works for the TV station.” On the far wall, I glimpse an oil portrait of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

  When I rise to depart for the bathroom, Ivano stands too. He has caught sight of a development that requires his attention. In his left hand he now holds a cordless power drill, outfitted with a Phillips-head screwdriver. A man walks toward him, bearing a Wisconsin license plate. The man is positively radiant. He appears to be a pilgrim like me, overjoyed at the prospect of being in the very spot where the chicken wing was invented. On second thought, maybe, like me, he’s just drunk. I cannot understand a word he says, but Ivano can. And as the man prattles on in Italian, Ivano screws his car tag to a place of honor alongside the waitress station.