Fried Chicken (13 page)

This reclusive nature may have its roots in a kind of shame engendered by Nashville's fried chicken boom and bust of the 1960s. Or perhaps it's because the story of Buffalo chicken wings is fairly tidy, well suited to the twenty-word blurb, while the tale of hot fried chicken as cooked in Tennessee is a messy one, spanning race, class, and 170 miles of roadway.

Over the course of the past five years, the media has made up for lost time. Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken in Mason has become a site of pilgrimage for in-the-know eaters. I may have ferried half of them there. I drove to Mason with Ed Levine, a New York-based writer who wrote a paean to Gus's chicken in
GQ.
I made the trek with Jeffrey Steingarten, who recounted the saga in
Vogue,
but chose to leave out the part about how we arrived two minutes after closing, and I, embarrassed by my failure as a guide, began begging and wheedling and bribing in a successful effort to cadge a cold order of hot chicken that had been previously committed to another customer.

Both Ed and Jeffrey wrote compelling pieces on the joys of eating Gus's spicy fried chicken. But I've come to believe that Gus's might be better appreciated as a vestige of a day when hot fried chicken was not an anomaly but a constant. It was once valued by working-class Southerners in the same way that a pepper-spiked bowl of Saturday-morning menudo is still prized by working-class Americans of Mexican ancestry. Both are basic sustenance that filled the belly, cleared the head, stymied a hangover.

While I am not immune to the charms of Gus's, Nashville is the only American city where an appreciation for hot fried chicken can reach fullest flower. In NashVegas, no one questions the difference between Buffalo heat and Tennessee fire. Here, devotees take pride in the fact that, while Buffalo wings owe their piquancy to a toss in sauce, the fire in local chicken comes at you from any number of sources, including one or more of the following: a dose of cayenne in the frying oil, a splash of Tabasco in the batter, a dash of powdered habanero in the breading, a sprinkle of any ol' dried and powdered pepper atop the finished bird, even a sluice of pepper-infused oil on the pickles that crown that same bird. In Nashville, at least among the drinking class, folks appreciate the kind of heat that compels you to grab a first-aid manual, thumbing wildly for a passage that differentiates between second- and third-degree burns.

 

 

 

on the drive home from another research trip, I recently stopped off in Nashville for a refresher course in hot chicken. Joe's Hotttt Chicken, a newly opened, six-seat take-away in the suburb of Madison, mixes the most aromatic seasoning blend, shot through with cayenne but also benefiting from what tastes like smoked paprika. Bolton's Hot and Spicy Chicken and Fish in East Nashville was conceived as a tribute to Colombo's, the fabled chicken shack that Bolton Polk once operated at the foot of the Shelby Street Bridge. But the birds that exit their fryers are dry, and the heat of their chicken is somehow muted by a duskiness that bespeaks cayenne long past its prime.

Hotchickens.com
, a gingham-trimmed fast-food outlet that opened in 2001, reflects the peculiar Nashville geek-in-a-cowboy-hat zeitgeist by way of its name and its ownership by country music darlings Lorrie Morgan and Sammy Kershaw. As for the chicken, rumored to be spiced and fried according to a recipe similar to Prince's, it's worthy of your patronage if not your devotion.

Speaking of devotion, Prince's Hot Chicken Shack still wins mine, for their four-in-the-morning weekend closing times; for their devotion to gargantuan iron skillets from which emerge some of the crispest, savoriest chicken around; for the architectural precision with which they stack a quarter-chicken atop two slices of white bread, crowning the whole affair with a couple or three pickle slices; and for their heavy hand with the pepper wand, their tendency to swab a thigh with enough hot stuff to prod a drunken patron into a stunned semblance of sobriety.

 

 

 

despite my love of the birds fried by Andre Prince and crew, I am drawn, inextricably, back to Mr. Boo's. Sure, the chicken is good: Diana Bouglea makes every effort to serve hand-cut birds that are less than a day away from the feedlot. Her breasts, which usually weigh in at over a pound, are a tad dry, but rarely have I tasted a breast that meets my standards of juiciness. Diana claims to employ four seasoning steps: First she injects the chicken with liquefied Bouglea peppers. Then she marinates it in Bouglea. Of course, she seasons her flour with Bouglea. And, after deep-frying her bird, she shakes a little extra Bouglea on for good measure. How much she shakes, and whether the particular ground Bouglea she employs is harvested from the leaves, stems, fruits, or rhizomes, determines whether you are eating mild, medium, hot, or what the menu advertises as “The Big Bang!”

I am also drawn to Diana Bouglea herself. I admire her white tennis shoes, which, thanks to a pall of pepper dust, seem to be shading toward claret. And, despite myself, I believe at least half of what the fifty-something-year-old tells me. As we talk, Diana refers again and again to her family's domain, “way down there in Poteet Parish.” But it takes me a good hour to extract from her that it is her husband, Mr. Boo, who hails from Louisiana. She, on the other hand, is a local girl, reared on the fiery goodness of Prince's Hot Chicken Shack.

She talks and I play along, asking her to tell me about life down in Cajun Country. She does not skip a beat. “In the early 1900s, about three generations back,” she tells me, “the Bouglea family discovered an odd-looking plant growing abroad their farm land in Louisiana, along the Mississippi Delta.” I smile, and between bites of chicken, plot a map that places Poteet Parish just this side of the Shelby Street Bridge.

 

 

the pervasiveness of hot fried chicken is a universal truth, born out by stories of fabled joints like 1960s-era Carrousel Lounge in Macon, Georgia, where old man Hodges sold rotgut liquor and caustically spiced chicken. Phil Walden, the rock-and-roll impresario who boosted the Allman Brothers to superstardom, once told me that Hodges was known for his Wake Up Chicken Special, which registered high enough on the Scoville scale to rouse you from a five-day drunk.

Later, while I was perusing the bins in a used-record store, I discovered that Walden was not the only one who doted on Hodges's hot fried chicken. On a 1972 album, Wet Willie, another of Walden's Capricorn bands, cut an instrumental, entitled “Red Hot Chicken,” in tribute to the fire of Hodges's bird.

Follow the musical thread and you expose a deep and abiding reverence for fried chicken spiced to a lip-scalding extreme. More than a quarter-century after Hodges's heyday, the New Jersey-based band Yo La Tengo (critical darlings of the late-'90s independent scene) cut “Hot Chicken #1,” “Hot Chicken #2,” and “Return to Hot Chicken,” in testament to their love of Prince's in Nashville.

I know of no songs cut in tribute to Kansas City fried chicken. If I could play a musical instrument—even if I were able to do nothing more than hum a tune in a key that would not call forth a pack of curs—I would rectify the situation in a moment, for Kansas City is one of the true citadels of poultry cookery. To my mind, K.C.'s worthy of at least a B-side single.

FOURTEEN

The Coronation of a Kansas City Roadhouse Queen

 

 

 

 

 

like Buffalo, New York—and, for that matter, Nashville, Tennessee—the fried chicken capital of Kansas City owes much of its reputation for excellence to the barroom. Or, more exactly, to the county-line roadhouse set just beyond the reach of local police. I knew this even before I hit the road. Reel off a list of fried chicken spots revered by natives of this sprawling metropolis, and, soon after they cease bemoaning the demise of swankish haunts like the Green Parrot Inn located just north of Country Club Plaza (America's first planned shopping mall) and the Wishbone (origin point of a certain fabled Italian salad dressing), talk will turn to questions of real import.

Questions like,
Can good chicken be fried in a kitchen not befouled by cigarette smoke, or is carbonized tobacco an essential ingredient?
And,
Is it true that a certain cook of great renown could not face the stove unless she had a tumbler of Seagram's VO at her side?

New arrivals, untutored in the history of Kansas City chicken cookery, might counter with a few questions of their own like,
Isn't fried chicken supposed to be the province of kindly grandmothers who also darn socks and knit afghans?
And,
Isn't a well-fried chicken an expression of love and family fidelity, not the province of a low-life roadhouse?

Invariably, the grandmom-and-apple-pie contingent loses out, for, as many a native of Kansas City knows, two roadhouse fry cooks forged the local reputation for fried chicken served with mashed potatoes, cream gravy, green beans, and biscuits. Betty Lucas and Helen Stroud honed their techniques to the tune of clinking beer bottles and a piano player stoked on whiskey and cigarettes.

 

 

 

every cook in town wants a piece of Betty Lucas, the woman Mimi Sheraton once dubbed the “pied piper of chickendom.” Known to her admirers as Chicken Betty, she was a peripatetic fryer, a kind of Johnny Appleseed analogue who spread the gospel of pan-fried chicken from roadhouse to restaurant, diner to coffee shop.

Born in 1910 in Nebraska, she grew up on a farm where hundreds of chickens scratched the dirt. “By the time I was thirteen,” she once said, “I knew how to catch and kill the chickens, then pluck, clean, and cut them up.” In between and sometime concurrent with hitches at various restaurants, Betty worked as a kindergarten teacher and a bookkeeper. But despite health problems that resulted in the eventual installation of a pacemaker, she always returned to the kitchen.

I try to chart her movements over the course of a sixty-plus-year career—and thus the untold cooks who claim to have learned at the elbow of the master—but, while perusing the archives at the local library, I lose count at about fifteen restaurants. One that will linger in my memory was Granny's, where the walls were plastered with photos of real-life grandmothers and a few male patrons dressed in octogenarian drag.

In the end, I face facts: I never knew Chicken Betty. I will never have the opportunity to taste her fried chicken. I will forever pine to have visited her at Boots & Coates, the barroom where she took up the skillet in the early 1970s. I will not eat a midmorning drumstick snack at the Metro Auto Auction's coffee shop, where Calvin Trillin tracked her down in the early 1980s. I will never know the pleasure of snagging a booth at the Westport Diner and biting into a haunch of fried bird while listening to an ancient piano player sing “Roll Out the Barrel.”