Fried Chicken (16 page)

But Fleer's chicken, served hot from the fryer, is disappointing. Thanks to the heavy jacket developed during the double battering, that autonomous crust proves not to be an asset but a liability. It's tough. Truth be told, I don't realize the genius of what Fleer and his crew are up to until later that same day. I am an hour down the highway, when I start digging through the box that, upon checking out, I found waiting on my passenger seat.

Most guests get their first taste of Fleer's chicken the way he intends them to—after forging a stream or ascending a mountain. I, on the other hand, have merely set the cruise control and pushed aside a cob of basil-marinated corn, a tub of creamy pineapple coleslaw, a sesame cheddar biscuit, a deviled egg, and a marshmallow-smeared oatmeal cookie sandwich, before finding my prize: a cardboard box-within-a-box of the type that Chinese takeout restaurants favor.

Within are a leg and a thigh. In the six hours out of the fryer, they've mellowed. What's more, the sweet tea flavor has come to the fore. The crust that was unyielding at seven in the morning has softened to a point still shy of collapse. Now pliable, now a kind of cornmeal-cracklin' appetizer wrapped around a drumstick, it proves to be the ideal vessel for the odd but delicious consommé of chicken and Lipton's that dribbles down my chin.

even after eating my fill of the fried chicken cooked by Peacock and Fleer, I remain unsure about what conclusions I should draw from their approaches. Both are ardent students of Southern cookery. Both are committed to working with fresh, local ingredients. Both have a predilection for buttermilk and a resolve that chicken—and for that matter, most any domesticated pork or poultry—tastes best when brined. But are these guys technocrats, intent upon reinventing fried chicken? Or are they fellow travelers in the tradition, bent upon wresting the most flavor and succulence from a bird that can be, at times, uncooperative?

Beats me, but their chicken eats great. And neither chef is secretive about sharing recipes. If you want to try to replicate Peacock's, just pick up a copy of his book
The Gift of Southern Cooking,
coauthored with Lewis. It's right there on page 104. As for Fleer, he's also at work on a book. And you can bet that when he hits the cooking school circuit, sweet-tea-brined fried chicken—served cold—will send his students into a collective swoon. Until that fine day, an adaptation of his recipe follows.

SEVENTEEN

A Chicken Coda

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tales of excellence in fowl fried by Southerners bring us back, of course, to Jim Villas. “To know about fried chicken,” he wrote, “you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period.”

Remember how I railed against his provincial bluster? Our last two cooks, Peacock and Fleer, may well prove Villas right. But I doubt it. Though I can't imagine coming across two non-Southern chefs who lavish as much attention upon the frying of chicken as they do, I am now more convinced than ever that there's a Yankee—or maybe a Korean man or a Serbian woman—out there right now, brining birds, rendering lard, doing his or her damnedest to prove Villas wrong.

Indeed, ethnicity may well be the defining characteristic of modern American fried chicken. In days past, stereotypes held that kerchiefed women of African descent were wizards of the skillet. To many Americans they were kitchen chattel, imbued with an innate ability to fry poultry that emerged from the kitchen devoid of grease and, perhaps more importantly, absent any claim to provenance. (Of course, many a white woman knew her way around a stove; but, at least for the moment, I am thinking of prevailing public perception, of how we Americans were wont to tell the story of fried chicken.)

In the intervening 200 years, much has changed. And much stays the same. Nowadays, the belief that fried chicken is an inscrutable product of culinary legerdemain is in decline. What's more, we now recognize that those African American women and men—most of whom either lived in the South or were one generation removed from Dixie—had family names as well as given names. With a little luck and the passing of a few more generations, they may yet garner the respect they deserve.

Meanwhile, here we are in twenty-first-century America. The Census Bureau tells us that our nation is now truly multiethnic. And so do my travels. If my read is right, a new generation of immigrants is claiming the mantle once consigned to Americans of African descent. And a new generation of fry cooks is now working at the fringes of society, reinterpreting our beloved fried chicken. Historian Karen Hess once explained this process of incremental change in the American diet by way of a Chinese expression that might be translated as
wok presence.
The idea is that each cook arrives at the stove with his or her own palate, his or her own cultural inclinations, and no matter how closely that cook might follow an established recipe, they are predisposed to refashion a dish to reflect, at least in part, their own traditions. And so it is with chicken as fried in my America.

I began my research propelled by the belief that fried chicken transcended the provincial, and, in the stories of immigrants, I found just what I sought. That's not to say I was closed to new ideas, for I also discovered much that surprised me. Conventional wisdom holds that the best fried chicken is cooked in American homes, in kitchens where cast iron skillets are passed down from one generation to the next like a kind of carbonized dowry. Until I hit the road, it's a belief to which I too ascribed. But two generations of American entrepreneurs and cooks have worked—in unsuspecting concert—to reinvent fried chicken. Indeed, my pilgrimage has led me to believe that the most compelling fried chicken stories of today are tales of commerce.

Over the past two or three generations, we have adapted a farmwoman's dish to suit our consumer culture. We have applied the faster-cheaper-better mantra to all facets of the fried chicken experience. In short, by commodifying fried chicken, we have made it more distinctly American. By means of factory farming, we drove down the price of poultry to the point where nearly everyone can afford it. We invented pressure-fryers and micronic oil filters for our restaurants. And, in time, we overlaid the archetypal family meal—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and biscuits—with the efficiencies and imperatives of fast food, creating a new perspective on what it means to eat American.

Some might choose to see these changes as deleterious, and I see their point. But I do not subscribe to such doom-saying. I'm inclined to take the bad with the good. I believe that the commodification of fried chicken bespeaks the process by which this dish has become iconic in the first place. It's the same process by which entrepreneurial ethnic cooks of today make fried chicken their own, the process by which chefs with roving palates are refashioning fried chicken to fit an America of which we have gleaned but a taste.

Pecking Orders: Thoughts on Technique, Ingredients, Equipment & My Little Black Book of Chicken Houses

This book offers two different ways to get your fried chicken fix. If you're keen on making your own, read on for a few tips on technique. Or, if you'd rather gas up the car and go barreling across America in search of a great fried bird, skip to page 175, where I offer a roster of chicken houses I believe to be worthy of pilgrimage.

 

 

Chicken is among the most modified of dishes. By modified, I mean that when referring to chicken, especially to
fried
chicken, we frequently attach an adjective or adverb—a modifier. Modifiers of yore were likely to vouch for the quality of the underlying bird, as in
yellow-leg fried chicken,
a reference to well-fed birds girded with a layer of yellowish chicken fat. Time of harvest was once important. Think of
spring chicken,
a reference to the days before commercial henhouses, when, though hens might lay eggs year-round, they were inclined to sit on eggs only during the warm-weather months. Six weeks after hatching, a spring pullet held the promise of tender fried chicken.

In the modern recipes I showcase, most of the modifiers have their origins in people and places, in the marinades and spice mixes that are traditional to their cookery. In many cases, these recipes are my interpretations of the dishes I ate while on the road. Others come straight from the cook in question.

When pondering a recipe, don't pay attention to defenders of the fried chicken canon who proclaim there is one true method, handed down from on high by the alpha fry cook. That's a load of hooey. Any good cook will take issue with some technique I advance, will want to tweak the recipes that follow, will work to make them his or her own. That said, here are a few guiding principles to keep in mind when you heft your skillet to the stovetop.

 

 

When possible, I use anything but regular-ol' grocery store birds. Call them free-range chickens. Call them pastured poultry. Call them air-dried fryers. In most cases, they taste better, are butchered better, are a far better buy (even at a two- or threefold premium) than the cheap stuff. Oh, and unless otherwise specified, any of these recipes will taste better if you brine the chicken for as little as four hours and as much as twenty-four in a gallon of water into which you dissolve a cup of salt.

I usually prefer chickens cut into the dual breast, wing, thigh, drumstick portions now standard in most grocery stores. But for any bird that tips the scales at more than three pounds, I cut the breasts crosswise into two portions, for a total of ten pieces. If you want to buy whole chickens and cut them up yourself, you might want to invest in a tome like
The Complete Book of Chicken,
written by the editors of
Cook's Illustrated
magazine. Though they snub fried chicken, devoting just twelve of the 486 pages to our beloved subject, they do provide a clear and well-illustrated primer on butchering poultry. If you cook your way through this book and are still looking for more fried chicken recipes, try Damon Lee Fowler's
Fried Chicken: The World's Best Recipes from Memphis to Milan, from Buffalo to Bangkok.
If you fall in love with frying and want to move beyond chicken, try John Martin Taylor's definitive
Fearless Frying.

If lard is specified in the recipe, get fresh leaf lard from your butcher. But if all you can find is the shelf-stable hydrogenated stuff, you might as well go with Crisco (or a similar vegetable shortening), supplemented by a bit of bacon grease. If you choose oil, make it peanut oil, which has a better flavor and a higher smoke point than many others. A little bacon grease won't hurt here either.