Fried Chicken (2 page)

“Fried Chicken,” a single cut in 1957 by Hank Penny, that featured a song called “Rock of Gibraltar” on the B-side. Not to mention the musical stylings of a guitar virtuoso named Buckethead who won fame by wearing a KFC bucket for a crown and claiming that he was raised in a chicken coop. “One night, a guy threw a bucket of chicken into the coop,” a Buckethead spokesperson explained in a 1999 newspaper article. “Buckethead freaked out and tried to put the chickens back together. Then he stuck the bucket on his head. By doing that, he got the power of the dead chickens.”

Fried chicken is also the stuff of pathos. “When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas,” wrote Maya Angelou in her memoir
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
“Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and father shipped us home to his mother. A [railroad] porter had been charged with our welfare . . . and our tickets were pinned to my brother's inside coat pocket. I don't remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up. Negro passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for the ‘poor, motherless darlings' and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad.”

Fried chicken is the stuff of tragicomedy. “Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant,” wrote Dick Gregory in his memoir
Callus on My Soul.
“This white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don't serve colored people here.' I said, ‘That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux, and Klan. They said, ‘Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin'. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.'

“So I put down my knife and picked up that chicken and kissed it.”

 

 

 

you may read the pages that follow in a couple of different ways. Read the following chapters as a social history of modern America told by way of fried chicken, and hopefully you won't be disappointed. Or you might choose to eat your way through this text, to come to know the life stories of these American cooks by way of their good cooking, treating my observations as historical and cultural footnotes.

Either way, you will learn, among other things, how to cook Italian fried chicken from a man born in India. You will make up your own mind about whether Kansas City can claim the title Pan-Fried Chicken Capital of America. You will taste Creole fried chicken in Louisiana, Buffalo fried chicken in upstate New York, and Latin fried chicken in California.

The first half of the book is dedicated, in large part, to my search for fried chicken in the margins, but you will also come to know revered traditional cooks like Deacon Lyndell Burton of Atlanta, who operated one of the early integrated lunch spots in the city; Hattie Edwards of Gordonsville, Virginia, who perpetuated the local tradition of meeting train passengers with platters of chicken and sleeves of deviled eggs; and Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson of the Chalfonte Hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, who, like their mother before them, claim more than fifty years at the stove.

And if I do my job well, you may be compelled to turn to the rear of each chapter and cook your way through the representative recipes I assembled. Some are of my own divination, as the original recipes were secret. Others were generously offered. Either way, they are a tribute to the good people who invited me to sit down at their table and trusted me with their life stories.

 

 

 

one more thing: You will find no nuggets here. No chicken fingers either. By my reckoning, fried chicken must have a bone. I have spent many hours contemplating the question of what qualifies as true fried chicken. My chosen place to ponder this matter was the Chevron mini-mart, three blocks from my home in Oxford, Mississippi. Contrary to what the cashier might have concluded, I was not wasting the night away, sipping absently from a cup of coffee, but formulating a theory of fried chicken that would exclude all manner of fused chicken parts.

My neighborhood Chevron was the ideal laboratory. Though there are two other Chevrons in downtown Oxford, the one on my street corner is known as the Chicken-on-a-Stick Chevron because, soon after the bars close and the fraternity socials peter out, the undergraduate demimonde descends upon
this
mini-mart, in search of sustenance of the fowl sort: die-cut chicken parts, breaded and threaded on pointy wooden skewers, and deep-fried to a sandy brown. I have been known to stumble home from a night on the town, clutching a bagful to my breast. That said, I have come to the conclusion—after intensive and sober study—that, although it may well be a close relative, chicken-on-a-stick does not fried chicken make.

Sure, one chicken-on-a-stick will take the edge off a six-pack buzz, but is it true fried chicken? Hardly. The presence of a bone in a piece of fried chicken is functionally and formally elemental. Without a bone, chicken lacks its savory essence, its primal, Henry VIII appeal. (The introduction of knives and forks to sixteenth-century Europe did not wholly sway lovers of poultry, who continue to savor birds out of hand.) And never mind the chicken-on-a-stick lovers who would argue that the wooden skewer serves as a proxy for a drumstick. By way of inelegant emulation, they prove my point.

TWO

Skillet Sisters of the Chalfonte Hotel

 

 

 

 

 

in an effort to be true to my quest, regardless of relation to the line mapped by Mason and Dixon, our story begins in New Jersey, along the coast. Though the region appears to flourish, the true heyday hereabouts was the last half of the nineteenth century when this tongue of land, stretching southward from Atlantic City, was the playground of the elite and influential. Local wags like to say that Cape May, the village at the southernmost tip of the tongue, is America's oldest seaside resort.

Given half a chance they will tell you that President Abraham Lincoln made the journey to Cape May to escape the oppressive summer heat of miasmic Washington. One man, who misinterpreted my interest in local restaurant history to be applicable to all facets of Cape May lore, flagged me down in the parking lot of the visitor's center to inform me that Henry Ford raced prototype autos on the beaches here, besting all comers until he lost to a man named Chevrolet. But I didn't drive my rental car down from Newark to hear such stories. I came to eat fried chicken at the Chalfonte Hotel.

I arrive at the inn—a clapboard dowager embellished with Romeo and Juliet balconies—armed with a modicum of information. I know that Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson, the Chalfonte's long-tenured cooks, fry chicken in two gargantuan cast-iron skillets that are so large they accommodate twenty or thirty pieces at a time. And I soon come to know that locals like to tell tales about how those skillets have been in continual use since the days when Lincoln walked the beach.

Before even unpacking, I make for the kitchen. It's just past five on a summer afternoon, and, according to the desk clerk, “the ladies are pulling the last of the chicken from the skillets.” Once escorted into the presence of Dot and Lucille, I ask a silly question: “Why do people come to the Chalfonte?” (I have a stunning facility for insightful question-making.)

Lucille laughs and turns the other way. Dot, who is spearing russet-hued pieces of chicken from a skillet the circumference of a manhole cover, looks me up and down and says, “Hell if I know. They don't have air-conditioning, don't have telephones or televisions in the little old rooms, and you have to walk down the hall just to use the bathroom.” And then, as an impish grin steals across her face, she allows, “It might have something to do with the food.”

 

 

 

dot Burton and Lucille Thompson learned to cook at the hem of their mother, Helen Dickerson, who, at the age of four, began her seventy-seven years of service at the Chalfonte. Her first job was flower girl, charged with gathering daisies and jonquils for the dinner table. Like their mother before them, these women have spent the great majority of their working lives at the Chalfonte. Dot began her tenure at the age of nine, washing sand from bathing suits and hanging the cleaned garments on guest doorknobs. Lucille came into the fold soon after, and save a period in the 1970s when she moved upstate to Princeton in a successful search for a husband, has been right by her sister's side.

Tight nests of gray curls frame their round faces. Dot and Lucille wear matching chef's whites, appreciate the balm of a good scotch, and share an unflagging devotion to the midday soap
Guiding Light.
You get the impression they might be twins, though Dot is seventy-six, Lucille seventy-five. They are both quick to laugh, and when they do, they cackle like schoolgirls. Among curators of Chalfonte lore, however, they are both considered more reserved than their mother: In her later years, Helen Dickerson took to holding court at a prep table, wagging her knife at passersby. If you dared enter the kitchen without greeting her by name, she was likely to fix you with an earnest gaze and ask, “Did I sleep with you last night?”

As young children Dot and Lucille shuttled back and forth from Richmond, Virginia, ancestral home of the Dickerson family, spending the school year in Virginia and Memorial Day to Columbus Day at Cape May. Accordingly, they claim a kind of divided loyalty, first to New Jersey, then to Virginia. But Dot—who, upon the death of their mother in 1990, assumed the job of Chalfonte fry cook—will tell you that, though the skillets are from Virginia, the recipe that her mother perfected came from a woman named Winifred Jones who hailed from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Like many a closely guarded recipe, the secret to Chalfonte-style fried chicken is actually quite simple. (Consider KFC's famous eleven herbs and spices. When William Poundstone, author of the book
Big Secrets,
hired a laboratory to analyze KFC's famous seasoning mix, the results were a little shy of the Colonel's claim: flour, salt, pepper, and MSG.) At the Chalfonte, the trick is even simpler. For reasons that are unclear to Dot, the distinctive feature of their recipe involves tossing a heap of thickly sliced onions into the grease just before lowering the first batch of floured chicken. The onions will fry alongside the chicken, batch after batch, turning darker and darker until the shreds of onions resemble flue-cured tobacco leaves.

It's seven in the evening, before I head to the dining room, intent upon eating my fill of this deceptively simple fried chicken. I take a seat by a screened window, hoping that I'll catch a breeze. The dowdy old shotgun ballroom is about half full. Wood flooring creaks beneath the trod of the college kids who work summers as waiters. Fans suspended from the eighteen-foot ceilings do nothing more than agitate the muggy air. Intermittently, the kitchen doors swing open and one of the crew deposits another platter of country ham, another pan of corn pudding, another skillet of fried chicken on the buffet line.

After the queue dies down, just when I spy another skillet emerging from the kitchen, I head for the buffet and load a plate with drumsticks and thighs and corn pudding. To my surprise, though I'm pretty sure I got my chicken soon after it emerged from the fryer, the crust on my thigh is firm but soft and faintly, just faintly, sweet. I was expecting a brittle crust that cleaved and crumbled with each bite.

Many months later, after talking this over with fellow fried chicken aficionados, I will call upon a number of theories about what advantage the onions offer. Perhaps the sugars in the onions impart a subtle sweetness. Maybe the water released by the onions ensures moistness. But for now, I am blissfully uninformed, munching a thigh enrobed in a soft and sweet mantle.

 

 

 

the next morning, I breakfast on fried flounder and spoonbread, before working up the nerve to ask Dot what she imagines will happen when she and Lucille retire. She does not flinch. “I imagine that when we step down,” she says, “they'll stow away those skillets and put in a row of deep fryers.”

Debra Donahue, the hotel's marketing manager, is listening to our conversation. She does not argue the point. Instead, she offers a press-kit-ready solution. “If we retire those skillets when Dot and Lucille go,” she says, “then what we'll do is mount them on the wall, crossing the handles like a coat of arms.” Warming to her idea, she waxes on, “That's it, those skillets, along with Dot and Lucille's names—and their mother's name too—we can mount them on the wall just above the entrance to the Magnolia Room.”