Sex and Bacon (7 page)

Get some chicken. Bone in, skin on. None of that sanitized
boneless, skinless
shit. Don’t bother.

Free range? If you must. Antibiotic-free? Whatever floats your boat. Personally, I wait until chicken parts go on sale for under $1 a pound at the supermarket, then I buy as much as I can afford and freeze what I don’t want to use immediately. But that’s just me, and I’m poor. And I’m all for people doing what they need to do, and if spending your hard-earned sourdough on fancy grain-fed boutique chickens is what you need to do then so be it. Just make sure you’re getting chicken parts that include bone and skin—because even designer chickens still have those proletarian qualities, regardless of how upscale their diet and how lush their accommodations.

Bone and skin flavor meat. Yes, the presence of bone and skin reminds us that something we’d like to serve for dinner used to be a living creature. But if you’re not at peace with your meat eating—if you can only stand to eat boneless, skinless chicken cutlets, processed and sanitized from actual chicken body parts into fatless jellied pucks resembling saline breast implants—then I respectfully suggest not attempting to fry chicken at home.

But if you’re “down with the sickness,” to borrow a phrase from the nice boys in the band Disturbed—if you’re at peace or at least in detente with your own savagery—if your mouth waters at the idea of ripping and tearing a certain luscious, once-living something apart—then get some chicken parts, file your canine teeth into points, and let’s rock this bitch.

Because I think “the sickness “ tastes mighty fine.

CHICKEN PARTS:
bone in, skin on.

Rinse the chicken under cool water and pat it dry with paper towels.

You can soak the chicken pieces in milk or buttermilk overnight if you have a bunch of milk on hand and no pressing need for fried chicken
right now
. Soaking the chicken makes the meat juicier, it’s true; but if you’re on a budget it can be hard to justify throwing away that much milk after the raw chicken parts finish their spa treatment. I only soak my chicken when I’m trying really, really hard to cook someone into bed with my good-time, down-home culinary mojo, and in that situation the difference between good chicken and
great
chicken might mean the difference between going to bed alone and going to bed with a buttermilk-biscuit-dazed paramour eager to sample the fare belw
my
Mason-Dixon line. But if I’m not cooking to seduce, my chicken goes without the benefit of a milk bath. Southern hospitality is one thing, but throwing away a half-gallon of milk every time I want a pan of fried bird parts is just faulty home economics.

Once you’ve patted the chicken pieces dry (of water or of milk), dip them into a bowl of two or three beaten eggs (if you like your fried chicken batter a little heavier). I do this sometimes, and other times I don’t. The thing about a recipe for fried chicken is that it contains multitudes: It can be prepared about a million differentways, and all of them are good. Milk or buttermilk or no milk,
egg
or not: It’s up to you. Ultimately, you’re gonna have a damn good pan of fried chicken on your hands no matter what.

Dump the egged (or not egged) chicken parts into a plastic grocery bag. Make sure the bag is intact, or, if you’re paranoid, you can double-bag. If you have a gallon-size Ziploc bag, by all means, use it.

Here are some things to throw into the bag on top of the chicken in various proportions, depending on ‘what you have in your kitchen:

• white flour
  
• cornmeal
  
• leftover cornbread, crumbled up very fine
  
• potato chips, smashed into near-powder; any flavor works, but barbecue chips add a certain je ne sais quoi
  
• saltme, Ritz, Waverly, or any other crackers, similarly crushed into tiny bits
  
• store-bought bread crumbs
  
• Corn Flakes
  ¹
  

It’s a good idea to add at least
some
white flour—maybe half flour, half whatever else you’re using—because the flour is fine enough to get in all the nooks and crannies of your chicken parts, preventing unappetizing piebald bare spots. If you don’t have anything else
but
white flour, that’s okay too. Sometimes—and I say this honestly—the simplest fried chicken is the best. Sometimes a light flour coating is all you need and all you could ever imagine wanting. I’m just throwing in some options so if you feel like getting all fancy—or if you have stuff in your kitchen cupboards you want to use up—you can.

Along with the flour (and whatever else you’re using, if you’re using any ingredients from the bulleted list), add a whole lot of ground black pepper, about a teaspoon of baking powder, a generous spoonful of paprika (if you have it—I almost never do, but it adds color and subtle flavor), what will seem like way too much salt (but, in reality, is probably not even enough), and two spoonfuls of garlic powder. You can also toss in a few spoonfuls of each (or none) of the folio-wing: poultry seasoning, Cajun or Creole seasoning, rosemary, marjoram, thyme, white pepper, Trappey’s Red Devil Sauce, Tabasco sauce, or whatever else you have around the kitchen that you think would go well with chicken. Stick your nose in the bag and inhale. Does the batter smell like the kind of fried chicken you want? If not, keep adding seasonings and adjust the proportions. Add more salt. Add more black pepper.

Once your batter smells the way you think it should, close the top of the plastic bag(s) and shake the chicken until every piece is completely coated.

Now, heat a skillet to just over medium heat on your range. Cast-iron is best, of course, but if you don’t have a cast-iron skillet just use your biggest, deepest frying pan. Throw in enough shortening so that when it melts it’s about half an inch deep. (Yes, that will be a lot of shortening.) If you have any bacon fat, add a few spoonfuls of that to the shortening to flavor it, but don’t fry your chicken in 100 percent bacon fat because it will end up tasting a bit burned, I’ve found. Bacon fat is fairly delicate—it works better as a flavoring agent than as an actual workhorse fat like shortening or lard.

Test the temperature of the melted shortening by flicking a few drops of water from your fingertips into the pan. If the water droplets sizzle and appear to hop around, you’re good to go. Don’t flick too hard—you don’t want an eyeful of hot Crisco. Trust me on that—it stings worse than come (not that that’s ever happened to me—no, sir).

Turn your oven on to 375 degrees.

Now, carefully put the first pieces of chicken into the hot oil. Carefully! Use tongs! Because the last thing you want is a bunch of hot oil splashing up and burning you! Don’t crowd the chicken pieces in the skillet—give them plenty of room so the hot fat can circulate around each piece freely. Use tongs (or a fork) to turn each piece over frequently and fry until the skin is golden brown (about ten to fifteen minutes total). Remove the fried chicken to an oven-safe baking pan (the long rectangular kind used for sheet cakes works best—9 x 12 or so).

Fry the next batch of chicken till golden brown, and add those pieces to the baking pan. You’ll need to add more shortening to the skillet as you continue frying.

Keep going until all your chicken parts are fried and in the pan. Grind more black pepper over the pieces, shake on more salt, and sprinkle on more Trappey’s or Tabasco sauce, if you like. If you want your chicken to look extra pretty, sprinkle some of the herbs you used to flavor the batter on top.

Pop the pan in the oven, uncovered. Cook for about fifteen minutes—wings get done faster, and breasts take the longest. Check to see if the chicken is done all the way through by cutting through a chicken breast to the bone—if the juices run clear instead of pink, it’s done. If not, leave in for another five to ten minutes.

If you don’t want to cook your chicken in the oven, just keep frying it in batches on your stove-top till the skin is golden brown and the meat is cooked through, turning each piece often. I like the oven method, though, because that way all my chicken is ready to be served at once.

Remove the pan from your oven and drain the chicken pieces on plates covered in paper towels. Eat with fingers as soon as the fried chicken is cool enough to touch. Serve with biscuits and homemade apricot jam or cream gravy if you’re trying to get laid, or with Wonder Bread and margarine (or corn fritters) if you’re feeling authentic. Don’t bother with a tossed green salad. Nobody in their right mind would eat salad when they could have another piece of fried chicken! The only thing green on the table should be collards, which are easy enough to prepare and hich don’t really count as vegetables, since they’re really only delivery systems for more salt and pork fat.

But really your chicken will stand alone. Be proud of it. Kat it until you’re talking like Foghorn Leghorn. This is the payoff for all your hardwork. And any date worth ten minutes of your time will match you piece for piece.

Have plenty of paper towels on the table, you bone-in, skin-on lovebirds. You’ll want em. Good fried chicken—like excellent sex—is invariably messy, and usually involves a fair amount of finger-licking.

HERE’S THE BEST
thing about fried chicken: No matter how good it is freshly made out of the oven,
t=it’s even better the next day
, cold from the fridge. My Oklahoma-born grandmother delicately refers to cold next-day fried chicken as “picnic-style,” and that seems about right to me, even though the last time I went to a park and ate on a blanket I -as bitten by sand mites and panhandled relentlessly.

But still—
picnic-style:
a red-checkered blanket, a basket, two wine glasses, a plate of fresh, cool grapes. A gracious old tree, providing shade! A cloudless blue sky! And grass cropped as neatly as a golf course beneath your blanket as you and your lover reach into the picnic basket and seize pieces of fried chicken. Then, baring your teeth like wild dogs and grunting in sheer animal pleasure, you greedily rip muscle from bone as the grease slicks your chin.

Well,
I
find it romantic.

1.
I’ve never tried this because I don’t tend to buy cereal, but a few folks swear by crushed Corn Flakes in their fried chicken batter. And -who am I to scoff?

II
FLESH

WHEN MY EDITRESS SENT ME THE FIRST ROUND OF MOCK-UPS
for the cover of this book, I &as greatly dismayed.

One cover showed a very very slender woman from the rear standing in front of a kitchen sink. The focal point of the image was her fist-size bottom, showcased by sexy black lace panties. Her bare back made it clear she was topless. The knobs of her spine cast shadows on her skin. “Sex and Bacon” trilled the title underneath her derriere in unironic contrast to the woman’s starved appearance.

It wasn’t the idea of having a naked lady on my cover that upset me. After all, my first book had one—and Lord, how I loved it when the audiences I read to asked me if it was
my
hot booty (instead of a professional model’s) on the cover! (“No,” I’d demurely as if splaying my ass on a product meant for public consumption was a completely alien concept to me, despite the fact that you can see my actual
asshole
on any number of pornographic websites for free.)

So, no, it wasn’t seeing a naked lady in sexy undies on my book cover, her bottom centered right above the title, that bothered me. Naked ladies are my bread and butter, as I’ve been one for pay, and write about ones I’ve known and loved. It wasn’t even the fact that most of her head and her legs were cropped away as nonessential, like the parts of an animal you don’t care to eat.

The model’s stripped-down angularity was the opposite of everything I wanted my book to be about. I was writing about good food, hot sex, the mystery and beauty of women’s bodies, and my cover showed a woman who looked like her last meal was sometime during the first Bush regime. She was so thin her shoulders were wider than her hips. How would you go about fucking a woman like that? You’d break her in half like a Hummel figurine trying to get inside her. I imagined trying to spread her bloodless thighs and hearing the sound of her pelvic girdle cracking apart. She had no padding, no protection, no
flesh
. Despite the racy lingerie, she was as sexless as a houseplant.