Fried Chicken (15 page)

The interior is a cipher: Hangdog adolescents outfitted in Hello Kitty couture slouch in birch wood chairs affixed with tieback pastel slipcovers. Club music blares from overhead speakers, giving me the impression that, in less than ten minutes, the floor might be cleared to make way for an afternoon rave.

When I make an attempt to chat up a teenage girl sitting in the corner, drinking bubble tea, she offers this much information before growing bored: Harue is a Korean version of a Japanese
kissaten,
which, if I understand her correctly, is an Eastern take on a Western coffee shop. That means, I tell her, the food of Harue has its origins in American coffee shop fare, first interpreted to suit the tastes of Japanese in Japan, and then reinterpreted to suit the tastes of Koreans now living in America. “Yes, you have it,” she says. “They serve Japanese-Korean-American food. Try the fried chicken.”

I do. It's hacked into irregular pieces, dusted in cornstarch, and fried to a crunch. It's very good. Preceding each platter of fried chicken come a half-dozen saucers of pickled vegetables, including kimchee. Alongside the chicken, waitresses deposit saucers of sesame-salt-pepper mix as well as a sweetish hot sauce, more than likely Sriracha, a Vietnamese brand.

The table is set with a choice of chopsticks and forks. I reach for the less familiar conveyance. And after fumbling a wing and then a quarter-thigh, I dip a nugget of breast meat attached to wishbone, first into the Sriracha, then into the sesame mix, and finally into my mouth. I chew around the wishbone, savoring the vaguely sweet taste of the meat, the heat of pepper, the muskiness of the sesame. Before I can get my chopsticks around the next bite, my waitress returns, bearing a platter of shredded cabbage. It's topped with a vaguely pink dressing that she seems loath to explain. “It's special,” she says. “It's special.” One bite of the slaw and sauce and I know what she means. It's akin to the “special sauce” on a McDonald's Big Mac.

I turn to seek confirmation from Miss Bubble Tea, but she has departed. After a couple more failed chopstick attempts, I pick up a fork and dive into my meal. As I eat, I think of Sam Lee, wishing that he were by my side, that he could pick up a fork and taste the future of American fried chicken.

 

 

lard. Many trees have been felled, much ink spilled in condemning this blunt noun. When the great baseball player Satchel Paige advised, “Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood,” chances are he was talking about meats fried in lard.

But lard is a hard habit to shake. Writing in 1860 of the South's devotion to all things fried and of the preferred medium for frying, Dr. John S. Wilson of Columbus, Georgia, observed, “Hog's lard is the very oil that moves the machinery of life, and they would just as soon think of dispensing with tea, coffee, or tobacco . . . as with the essence of hog.” One supposes that the good and temperate Dr. Wilson lamented his fellow man's love of lard.

Of late the dietary pendulum has swung in favor of pig fat. Turns out that it's lower in saturated fat than butter. A whole new generation of cooks is learning to love the crispness of a drumstick fried in the good stuff. Scott Peacock, whose story follows, is one of those converts.

But like dolphin fish reborn as mahi-mahi, lard may not survive this resurgence with its name intact. Niman Ranch, the specialty meat provider, is now marketing decidedly American lard by way of a decidedly French name,
saindoux.

SIXTEEN

A Sonnet in Two Birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

scott Peacock, chef of Watershed, a hip, celadon-hued restaurant and wine bar in Decatur, Georgia, fries chicken on Tuesdays. And only on Tuesdays. John Fleer, chef of the Inn at Blackberry Farm, a luxe resort in the Great Smoky Mountains of northeastern Tennessee, fries chicken on Saturdays. And only on Saturdays.

In the modern South—where fried chicken is oftentimes a dish of immediate resort, a fast-food commodity purchased by the box and on the go—once-a-week restaurant chicken feeds are both romantic and practical. Romantic in that they bespeak a time when fried chicken was known among many rural folk as a farm-raised, Sunday indulgence, a gospel bird. Practical in that the two-plus days of prep work now employed by these chefs is onerous.

Prevailing wisdom—as communicated by Southern cook-books of the past century, especially by those books geared toward home cooks—leads you to believe that fried chicken is among the most elemental of dishes. Many contemporary recipes dictate such simplicity that, if the fried chicken actually tastes as good as promised, I'm inclined to look to sorcery as the reason.

Cut and wash the chicken, dredge in flour, season with salt, and fry. That's what Mary Randolph, author of the 1824 masterwork
The Virginia Housewife,
would have you do. And if you talk to a Southerner with puritanical culinary inclinations, they are likely to subscribe to the Randolphian school. These cooks believe in paying homage to great ingredients by allowing their integrity to shine through.

But chicken ain't what it used to be. Big-breasted, spindly-legged birds, raised in close confinement and shot through with all manner of growth-promoting hormones and antibiotics, are now the rule. Yard birds raised
en plein air,
scratching about for scraps and grain while developing stronger muscles and, by extension, darker and more flavorful meat, are the exception. And so it follows that, if chicken ain't what it used to be, then neither is fried chicken.

one of the abiding themes of my pilgrimage has proven to be that, throughout the country, the most intriguing fried chicken dishes seem to be served by restaurants where the cooks monkey the most with the birds. In the South, this trend rings truest. At Gus's, chicken marinates in a viscous, pepper-laced solution that resembles crimson yogurt and gives the chicken a lip-tingling heat; Austin Leslie swears by topping his deep-fried chicken with a confetti of garlic and parsley as well as a spot of pickle juice; and at Greenwood's the chicken emerges a bit dry from the fryer, but is redeemed by dipping the breasts in pepper vinegar and then drizzling them with honey.

And yet, these folks have nothing on Peacock and Fleer, the aforementioned weekly fryers. I am not inclined to posit that either cooks the best fried chicken in the South—or even that such a such a designation has merit—but I am convinced that both gentlemen have achieved a modern mastery, balancing age-old ways and new imperatives of flavor.

 

 

 

scott Peacock's chicken
looks
simple. The presentation is straightforward. Breast, leg, and thigh, each piled one atop the other on a white plate, each burnished a coppery brown. Accompaniments are whipped potatoes and garlicky green beans. Fat and fluffy biscuits too.

I bite into the breast. The crust has fused with the skin, and it crackles upon contact with my teeth. You can actually
hear
the crunch. And while most white meat is dry, woody even, this bird squirts juice. Not grease, but juice, rivulets of pork-scented chicken broth. After spending a few hours at Watershed, talking chicken with Peacock, scribbling notes as he advanced various theories of cookery that both met and confounded my expectations, I was prepared to be disappointed.

No taste could be worth brining the bird for twenty-four hours in a saltwater solution, soaking it for an additional day in buttermilk, and then, after rolling the salted and peppered pieces in a mix of flour and a smidgen of cornstarch, frying them in a fifty-fifty mix of butter and lard infused with country ham. But there it is, on the plate, for all to admire: the perfect fried chicken breast.

It did not surprise me to hear Peacock say that he prefers to fry his chicken in a skillet. “Skillet cooking works from the bottom to the bone,” he told me. “It's slower, more seductive than deep frying, like taking a warm bath instead of a scalding dip.” And yet, although he dearly loved his grandmother, Peacock is not the kind of cook who wields her old skillet.

Instead, he fries his chicken in an oversized Italian-made stainless-steel pan that will accommodate twenty pieces. And then there's the matter of frying medium. Though he grew up in southern Alabama where the soil is a sandy loam, perfect for growing peanuts, he came to see that the peanut oil with which he was accustomed to cooking couldn't match the flavor punch of the aforementioned lard and butter admixture favored by his eighty-something-year-old mentor, Edna Lewis of Freetown, Virginia.

If forced to categorize his ethic, I would label Peacock a neo-traditionalist. His career has taken him from cooking quail at a hunt camp in southern Georgia, to serving broiled lobsters alongside a nasturtium salad at the Georgia governor's mansion. Along the way, Peacock has honed a very personal cuisine. Granted, he'd be the first to pay his due to his longtime friend and present housemate, Lewis, revered as a grande dame of the South. But by the sheer act of frying chicken this well, Peacock lays claim to his own place in the pantheon.

 

 

 

john Fleer's sweet-tea-marinated fried chicken will be cold by the time you taste it. Well, maybe it won't actually be cold—room temperature might be the best way to describe it. No matter, it won't be fresh from the fryer, for it was cooked about seven in the morning. More than likely, you will bite into your first drumstick on one of the switchback trails that wend around Hurricane Mountain, eventually leading back to the Inn at Blackberry Farm. That's where, since 1992, Fleer has been cooking in a style that he's dubbed Foothills Cuisine.

Fleer came up with the idea of tea-brining while conferring with his sous-chef: “We were talking about how brines incorporate salt and liquid and acid, discussing how a little red wine never hurt. And then it hit me: sweet tea, the house wine of the South. . . . It's always seemed like the hardest part of my job has been packing five-star expectations into the green boxes we hand out for picnic lunches. I had been searching for something that was definitively Southern and distinctly ours. That was it.”

On Wednesday, Fleer and his crew make tea. Sweet tea with lemon, the same brew served in hundreds of lunch-rooms across the South. After stirring salt in to make a brine, the cooks submerge the chicken—they use legs and thighs only—in the marinade. Two days in the refrigerator follow, during which the salt carries the musky sweetness of the tea throughout the chicken. Early each Saturday the morning crew drain the birds before soaking them in a buttermilk and egg solution and then, finally, rolling the chicken twice in a mixture of cornflour and wheat flour spiked with salt and pepper and Old Bay seasoning.

I am present one recent Saturday morning when the first batch emerges from the fryer. The crust boasts a kind of pleasantly gritty exterior. But while Peacock's fused with the skin, Fleer's crust announces autonomy. As for the meat itself, the brine gives the legs and thighs a muted herbaceous quality that, if I were not aware of its source, I might attribute to unlikely origins, say bourbon or bitters or prune juice.