Fried Chicken (3 page)

It seems a fitting tribute. Sure, it has never been about the skillets, and Debra knows this. Dot and Lucille know this. I know this. We all know that the tradition embodied by those oversized skillets, the lives manifest in their ebony sheen, is best understood in terms of toil, in terms of decades of fourteen-hour days spent on their feet, at the stove. A skillet cannot encapsulate their lives. And much as I would like to think otherwise, neither can this book.

There are many pitfalls to appreciating the likes of Dot and Lucille. Far too many times over the course of my research, I heard well-meaning folk consign a woman's mastery of kitchen craft to some sort of supernatural phenomenon wherein the acquired skill of African American cooks was deemed beyond our reckoning and thus deigned an “expression of soul.” That's too pat, too limiting, too freighted with the possibility of denying the richness of experience of the human beings whose hands were ever on the skillet.

I think of Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson as archetypes, in league with cooks of yore, sisters black and white, whose stories I came to know while wandering about America. Among the deities are women like Helen Martin of the Brookville Hotel in Brookville, Kansas; Hattie Bair of the Iron Springs Sanitarium in Steilacoom, Washington; Myrtie Mae Barrett of Myrtie Mae's Homestyle Chicken Dinners in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and Hattie Moseley of Hattie's Chicken Shack in Saratoga Springs, New York. Their lives, and the loss catalogued upon their deaths, give heft to Calvin Trillin's observation, “A superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman[;] like a good secondhand bookshop or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.”

 

 

 

 

 

the stories of strong women make up the backbone of the American fried chicken story. For women like Dot Burton and Lucille Thompson—as well as Smilka Toplasky, whose story follows—the impulse to stand facing the stove and cook is a matter of livelihood.

But for others, like Ruby Pearl Dowda of Trafford, Alabama, it was a matter of conscience. According to her granddaughter, she was a farmwoman of mixed race who passed for white. To earn a few extra dollars, she raised chickens and tended a truck garden. The men in her family worked the coalmines of northern Alabama and liked to tell people that they were on the wrong side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge—and the issue—when Dr. King and his followers marched to demand voting rights in 1965.

Ruby Pearl Dowda did not march at Selma. She did not lock arms with fellow protesters and sing “We Shall Overcome.” But when she saw news reports of trouble down in Birmingham, she gathered eggs from her chicken house, pulled a few hens from the flock, and fried batches of chicken, baked pans of cornbread.

When her men were down in the mines, she took the train into Birmingham and, as the movement flared around her, walked the streets, handing out box lunches tied with twine. “She gave them to every black child who looked hungry,” recalls her granddaughter, “to every white child who needed to eat.”

THREE

Pahovana Piletina,
That's Fried Chicken to You

 

 

 

 

it's a little past noon on Sunday in the burg of Barberton, in north-central Ohio. Church just let out. Traffic on Wooster Street, the main drag, is bumper to bumper, Ford to Chevy. At a wood-paneled corner restaurant known as White House Chicken, a middle-aged woman named Darlene holds forth at a corner table.

“I'll tell you one thing,” she says, shaking her finger alternately at her mother, her husband, me. In her other hand is a chicken breast. “The people at Village Inn fry too dark. The coleslaw at Belgrade Gardens is too watery. I don't like the fries at Hopocan Gardens. This is my place. . . . I've been eating chicken at White House for more than forty years, been coming here after church since I was a baby, and I'm telling you that this is what Barberton chicken is supposed to taste like.”

 

 

 

working-class Barberton has been heralded at various times as home of America's largest sewer tile kiln and the match-manufacturing capital of the world. But allegiances are now sworn and epithets hurled in the name of whose bird is freshest, whose crust is crispest. Here fried chicken hearkens back to Serbia, where Smilka Topalsky, the widely acknowledged progenitor of the Barberton chicken phenomenon, was born just north of Belgrade. I came here, hard on the heels of my time in New Jersey, in search of exemplary fried chicken and tales of immigrant life.

Smilka and her husband Milos were accidental restauranteurs. Saddled with debt during the Great Depression, the second-generation Ohioans ceded the family dairy farm on the outskirts of town to the tax collector. But in a typical immigrant bootstrap story, Smilka cooked the family back to solvency by way of bread-crumb-coated fried chicken, vinegary coleslaw, a kind of tomato-rice slurry known as hot sauce, and lard-fried potatoes, served first in the family home and later, around 1933, in the family restaurant, Belgrade Gardens. Topalsky lore holds that these dishes were exacting replications of what Smilka and Milos knew in the Old Country as something like
pahovana piletina, kupus salata, djuvece,
and
pomfrit,
respectively.

Some natives carp that the dishes were not as true to Old World form as the Topalskys and their boosters would have you believe. And to a certain extent, they have a point, for chicken paprikash might have been a more likely crossover contender than fried chicken, and Belgrade Gardens' distinctive hot sauce recalls nothing so much as a spicy riff on TV-dinner-style Spanish rice. But the story of American fried chicken is a tale of assimilation and adaptation. Bread-crumb-coated meat cutlets and poultry parts are staples of many European traditions, from the cookery of Milan to that of Vienna. Such takes on the fried chicken theme become distinctly American as one generation begets the next, as crumbs made with Old World breads are supplanted by pouches sold by Pepperidge Farm.

Over time, the foods that emerged from Smilka Topalsky's kitchen came to be considered core elements of the Barberton chicken story—embraced by all manner of recently immigrated Croats and Hungarians and Slovaks as not so much Serbian, but American. Soon, German and Irish immigrants were sitting alongside Croats and Hungarians and Slovaks. Their points of origin were myriad. Their love of fried chicken brought them to the same table. And in a curious way, fried chicken proved a substantive and symbolic part of their rebirth as polyglot Americans.

Imitators emerged quickly. Another family of Serbs, the Milichs—who had worked the kitchen and floor at Belgrade Gardens—opened Hopocan Gardens on Hopocan Road in 1946, then served virtually the same chicken, sauce, coleslaw, and potatoes. Like the Toplaskys, they were recently immigrated Serbs. A third Serb, Mary Marinkovich, opened White House Chicken in 1950, and was soon followed by—among other pretenders to the throne—Orchard Inn, Western Star, Terrace Gardens, and The Flagpole.

Today, four of Barberton's old-line chicken dinner restaurants survive: Belgrade Gardens, Hopocan Gardens, Village Inn, and White House Chicken. With the possible exception of Belgrade Gardens, all are best appreciated as linoleum-and-leatherette warhorses, glorified cafeterias that are long on value but short on decor. Perhaps as a consequence, the chicken dinner houses of Barberton do not garner the respect they deserve. In a way it's their own fault, for these restauranteurs have been in the business so long that they are blind to all: their eyeglasses are streaked with lard, their dining-room windows smudged with flour.

one retired chicken man tells me that, a couple years back, Mayor Randy Hart of Barberton suggested that the local reputation for fried fowl was a “stigma” that the community should shed. Barberton was once a workingman's town, but the match factory and the sewer tile kiln and the rubber plant and the boiler factory have all closed. It's now a town scratching about for an identity, a town where the fans of opposing basketball teams mock the Barberton High boys by wearing chicken buckets on their heads. Sadly, it's now a town where such pranks hurt—not because the city's fried chicken heritage hints at some shared underlying foible of Barberton folk—but because the city lacks the vision and mettle to celebrate what distinguishes this burg from thousands of others in Middle America.

That realization gets me down. But it also gets me eating. As a gesture of solidarity, I pledge that, for the remainder of my visit, I will eat not two but three meals a day of Barberton chicken. I even deign to eat at one of the newfangled franchises.

And what do I divine? Halfway through my bacchanal, I decide—just as I did at the Chalfonte—that all Barberton chicken tastes absurdly simple, almost ascetic. When I ask the man or woman on the street why Barberton chicken tastes so good, I hear no talk of secret spice mixes, no discussion of proprietary marinades or breading mixes. And I find comfort in that.

I get similar non-responses from the restauranteurs. Each one I meet, from Sophia Papich, daughter of the Topalskys, to Dale Milich, proprietor of the Village Inn, admits that since most every proprietor is related by blood or marriage or employment history, the chicken recipes and techniques vary little from house to house.

About technique, I'm told: First you roll the chicken in salted flour. Then you dip it in egg wash. Then you roll it in bread crumbs. Finally you drop it in roiling lard, where it cooks until done.

When we talk philosophy, each restauranteur sketches out the same three tenets: True Barberton chicken is fresh, never frozen. (Most birds are raised by downstate Amish farmers and were pecking about the barnyard a couple of days previous.) True Barberton chicken is seasoned with nothing but a modicum of salt. True Barberton chicken must be cooked in lard, for a great crust requires liquid swine.

And it is to this last tenet that I cleave. Among a certain circle of chicken house connoisseurs, arguments ensue over whose hot sauce is the liveliest, whose coleslaw is the sweetest, whose fries are the crispest, or whose bird is the freshest. But for me, it proves to be all about the crust. And I believe the crust is all about the lard. When prepared in the traditional manner, Barberton chicken emerges from its porcine baptism sheathed in a crisp but slightly chewy coating that even an upstart like me can come to appreciate as the best part of the meal.

Toward that end, on my last day in town, a regular at Belgrade Gardens takes me aside and lets me in on a little secret. He tells me that he loves fried chicken backs—which the restaurant markets as chicken ribs. Though they yield little meat, they offer a wealth of crust to be chomped from the bone. When I look skeptical, my new friend offers a rib, and I am soon gnawing away.