Fried Chicken

by John T. Edge

And so it is that, with a sort of resignation, I take a seat at K.T. Fryers, a suburban fern bar purported to be one of the places where Chicken Betty’s recipe—and her spirit—lives on. They get the chicken right: thin of crust and juicy of thigh. And the gravy is a lumpy and cracklin’ clogged thing of beauty. But there’s no rollicking piano player in sight. Indeed, the only music I hear is a Muzak-tempered ditty made famous by Air Supply, back about the time when Betty would have been bucking and swaying at Boots & Coates. Though a consensus among my best local sources has steered me here, I get the distinct impression that Betty’s spirit, in need of a little more action, has taken up residence elsewhere.

  compared with Chicken Betty, Helen Stroud was not so peripatetic. But she was no less lively. Born in 1901 in Wichita, she came to Kansas City as a teenager and worked as an insurance secretary before enrolling in law school and subsequently dropping out to marry a fellow student named Stroud. Somehow—details are murky—this string of events compelled Helen and her beau to open a fireworks stand and then a barbecue restaurant beyond the Kansas City line.

  The far-flung location entitled Helen to sell booze on Sunday. And thanks to the booze, Stroud’s sometimes drew a boisterous weekend crowd. But Helen never brooked any foolishness. “I was a good bouncer,” she told a local reporter in the 1960s. “If a man and a woman didn’t come in together, they couldn’t dance together.”

  Over time, the roadhouse’s proclaimed specialties of barbecue ribs and sardines gave way to fried chicken. Precious little evidence remains to explain why, save a rumor that, by the late 1940s, chicken was too cheap to ignore. (Surely, Stroud’s motto, “We Choke Our Own Chickens,” can’t be a relic of the days when Helen killed her own poultry?)

  Helen bought fresh chicken, always shipped on ice and never frozen. While Chicken Betty was not immune to the allure of MSG, Helen limited her seasoning to salt and pepper. What’s more, she insisted that every bird that exited her kitchen was fried, not in the basket of a deep fryer, but in a pan.

  Perhaps she believed in some alchemical effect only achieved when iron, chicken, and flour meet. It’s more likely that Helen knew well what I now suspect: that great pan-fried required close attention, while deep-frying is almost set-it-and-forget-it easy. Knowledge of the latter can lead to laziness on the part of a cook and, as a result, chicken unworthy of Helen’s good name.

  today, pan-fried still means something in Kansas City. It’s a talismanic conjunction of words, an incantation of good food recognized by everyone. Here, pan-fried is heralded in the same manner that a suit maker trumpets hand-stitched lapels and functional sleeve buttons. It shouts to the world that someone laid his or her hand on the skillet, that a Seussian machine did not accomplish this work of frying, that these pieces of chicken did not achieve their crunch by means of a conveyor-belt crawl through the oil.

  Thanks to the stewardship of the two successive owners that followed Helen Stroud, her namesake restaurant is still revered by locals as a citadel of pan-fried chicken. It helps that Stroud’s looks the part. At the original location, a brown, shingle-lapped wreck in the shadow of the Troost Avenue Viaduct, the windows are clouded by diesel fumes and smudged by generations of grime-stained fingers. Here, the chicken has the right crunch, the mashed potatoes taste of the earth, and the green beans collapse in a heap like they should.

  But all that said, the clientele now appears a bit dowdy, a little too family-focused. Sure, Stroud’s occasionally rolls out the upright piano on Saturday nights and encourages everyone to sing along, but in the fluorescent light it seems more like a pageant staged for the benefit of people like me, who were not lucky enough to be in attendance when the real shit flew.

  For that sense of raffish delight—and chicken that meets the same pan-fried standards as Stroud’s—I make my way west of downtown to Opal’s, which, despite a cheery paint job and a collection of art that might have been ordered direct from the studios of Bob Timberlake, conjures a vague seediness.

  I can’t quite put my finger on the source of the funk until, as I drag a thigh through a puddle of gravy, my dining companion, local restaurant critic Charles Ferruzza, tells me a little secret. It seems that before opening a restaurant named for the fry cook’s grandmother, the owner of Opal’s ran Club Cabaret, a drag bar featuring a coterie of locally famous illusionists.

  I ponder this information while resolving that, although Opal’s is not my ideal, their chicken is great. Indeed, it may be the closest thing to a twenty-first-century roadhouse where, if Betty and Helen and I wanted to knock back a few shots and talk poultry, we would be welcomed with open arms and cheap drinks.

  Skillet-Fried K.C. Yard Bird with Skillet-Lickin’ Gravy

  KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

  Gravy was once an integral part of most fried chicken recipes. As Margaret Birdwell notes in 1953’s Kentucky Fare,“Cream gravy is fried chicken’s almost invariable accompaniment.” Somewhere along the way, gravy fell out of favor. One of the remaining strongholds is the Midwest, specifically Missouri and Kansas, where fried chicken without gravy is like a candle without a wick.

  ■ 1 chicken weighing 3 to 4 pounds (the

  smaller, the better), cut into 8-10 pieces

  ■ 1 egg

  ■ 2-2½ cups milk

  (continued)

  ■ 1 tablespoon salt, plus more to taste

  ■ 1 tablespoon pepper, plus more to taste

  ■ 2 teaspoons Accent seasoning

  ■ Peanut oil into which you mix about

  3 tablespoons bacon grease

  ■ 1 cup all-purpose flour, plus 1 tablespoon

  more for gravy

  Beat egg and 1 cup of the milk until frothy. Dip chicken pieces individually, shaking off excess and resting on wax-paper-lined tray. Sprinkle both sides of chicken with 1 tablespoon salt and pepper, and Accent. Heat oil in pan, at a depth of about 1½ inches, over medium-high heat. Toss each chicken piece in a paper bag filled with 1 cup flour, and shake off excess as you remove each piece. Beginning with the dark meat, slip chicken into pan, skin-side down, and fry at approximately 300-325° for 5-6 minutes. Turn and fry for 5-6 minutes more. Cover partially and fry for another 15 minutes, turning as needed. Remove when chicken is coppery brown or when an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white meat. Drain on a wire rack.

  Make gravy by pouring off all but 1 tablespoon of the grease from skillet. Return skillet to stove and place over low burner. Toss in the 1 tablespoon flour and scrape up cracklings and other bits from bottom. Brown flour until it turns the color of a football. Pour in 1-1½ cups milk and stir until smooth. Season to taste with additional salt and pepper. Pour gravy over mashed potatoes, not over chicken. Serves 4.

  Jail Birds

  fried chicken once evoked a rural idyll, a time and place where many cooks had the luxury, the inclination to devote hours on end to the preparation of Sunday supper. But as America has urbanized, so has American cooking. So has fried chicken.

  The rural-to-urban migration has been a catalyst for welcoming new fryers to the fold. As we will discover in the chapter that follows, first-generation immigrants have embraced fried chicken as a symbol of assimilation, as well as a means of gaining financial independence. But urban life begets urban travails. Like crime. If a recent perusal of a newspaper morgue is to be believed, fried-chicken-related crime is on the rise. Among the recent highlights: ■ In November of 1993, Fareedullah Nawabi was arrested for selling guns from the drive-thru window of Mama’s Fried Chicken in New York City. Upon seizing over sixty pieces of ordnance including an assault rifle and a few machine pistols, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly observed, “Obviously some deadly side dishes were being served in the Bronx.”

  ■ In September of 2002, Carlos Ayala, an employee of KFC in Mill Valley, California, was arrested for selling marijuana while at work. His arrest was prompted by a drive-thru customer who asked for extra biscuits with his box of fried chicken. Instead of forking over the biscuits, Ayala
allegedly handed him two nickel bags of marijuana.

  Is there a moral to this story? Nope. Just be wary of the drive-thru clerk who tells you that extra biscuits cost . . . well, extra.

  FIFTEEN

  Seoul Food

  sam Lee is a businessman who happens to fry chicken. Upon leaving Seoul, South Korea, in 1971, he settled in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. After years of menial labor and frugal ways, he saved enough money to buy a liquor store. In 1988 he sold his liquor store and moved north to Seattle, in search of better schools for his children.

  Like hordes of other new arrivals, he gravitated to sprawling Pike Place Market, beloved by tourists who photograph the salmon-tossing antics of fishmongers, revered by local gastronomes who prowl the day stalls in search of bok choy and bing cherries. Sam spent a good six weeks at the market, taking note of traffic patterns and customer preferences, in search of a cash business he could buy.

  Chicken Valley was on the block. And though Sam knew nothing of its beginnings in the 1920s, he liked what he saw: low overhead, a steady stream of customers, a regular exchange of fives and ones. At the time Sam bought Chicken Valley it was known as a retailer of fresh poultry—quail, pheasant, chicken, duck, goose, turkey—and, to a lesser extent, as a vendor of fried chicken. When Sam bought the counter-based business, he changed that balance, introducing fried rice and devoting less space to the display of dressed poultry. “I follow the trends,” Sam tells me by way of explanation. “I serve what my customers want.”

  As we talk, our feet hiked on opposite sides of an alley dumpster, Sam resists, and then finally succumbs to my questions about what it means to be a Korean man frying chicken in the States. “I fry American-style chicken,” he tells me. “I tried to serve Korean spices, but that is dangerous for a businessman in America. I can’t serve kim chee; that would confuse my customers. They see my face and know I am Asian, but they taste my fried chicken and know it’s American. That’s what stays with them. But I still try small things: When I added fried rice, I decided to use Korean-style, Japanese-style sticky rice.”

  Sam’s musings about the danger of serving Asian-spiced chicken call to my mind the typical immigrant’s passion for assimilation. Though now on the decline among newer generations, this push to become American at all costs owed some of its origins to fear of social and economic ostracism of the sort that gave birth to the Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. For people like Sam, such fear manifests itself in the nagging knowledge that if one is to thrive here, he must play by American rules.

  sam Lee’s Chicken Valley does not claim to be a fulcrum of fried chicken cookery. And despite what Oprah Winfrey and legions of her fans pledge, crosstown favorite Ezell’s Fried Chicken is not poised to be the next citadel of fried fowl. But there exists now in Seattle, and dozens of other American cities, the possibility of a new style of cuisine that shuns geographic labels and ethnic imperatives in favor of cultural complement. That possibility got me on a plane, bound for Seattle. I know there are pitfalls aplenty, among them a tendency toward strumpeted fusion, but in opening the door to possibility, a city like Seattle entertains the possibility of great new tastes.

  Over the course of my travels, I’ve seen this possibility manifest at a model train shop in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where a man of Indian descent sells homemade samosas and freezer-case pastries amid displays of HO-gauge rail cars and cabooses. I’ve seen this reality in practice at a donut-teriyaki stand in San Francisco, California, where, after a couple years of selling General Tsao chicken from a steam table and maple long johns from an adjacent pastry case, dim sum carts laden with maple-glazed buns now make noontime rounds. But I’ve never been more aware of the possibilities than I was on a recent trip to Atlanta, Georgia.

  if Sam Lee were to incorporate Korean spices and techniques, his chicken might taste a lot like the birds fried at Harue, a hipster coffee shop set in a former Wendy’s on Buford Highway, Atlanta’s multiethnic main a street. On the day I dine, I am the sole white face in the crowd. I bet I am also the oldest.

  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.

  Korean-American Fried Chicken

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON (WITH A TASTE OF ATLANTA, GEORGIA)

  Korean fried chicken is a dish of assimilation. In my travels, I have encountered many a Korean who, in an effort to cook American, has forgone his native palate in favor of a perceived North American standard. Among the pleasant exceptions has been Chicken Valley, where, despite Sam Lee’s claims, I taste something of his native Seoul in the crisp skin. Even more pronounced is the chicken fried at Harue.

  ■ 1 chicken weighing 3 to 4 pounds (the

  smaller, the better), cut into 8-10 pieces

  ■ ¼ cup soy sauce

  ■ ¾ cup rice wine vinegar (the seasoned kind)

  ■ ¼ cup cornstarch

  ■ ½ cup all-purpose flour

  ■ 1 tablespoon salt

  ■ Peanut oil

  ■ 1 cup sesame seeds, toasted

  ■ 1 cup sea salt

  ■ 1 cup black pepper

  ■ 1 cup Sriracha hot chili sauce

  Combine soy sauce and vinegar in a large bowl. Add chicken, and marinate for 2 hours, turning occasionally. Combine cornstarch, flour, and salt in a paper bag. Add chicken, shaking until very lightly coated. Remove to a wire rack, shaking again to loosen any stray flour.

  Heat 3 inches of oil to 350° in a deep and heavy pot. Fry at 325° for 12-15 minutes until chicken is blond-brown with russet highlights, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white meat. Place chicken on wire rack to drain.

  Portion sesame seeds, sea salt, and pepper into fourths and place mix of each into four small bowls, one for each guest. Portion hot sauce in same manner, into 4 more bowls. Dip chicken alternately into sesame-salt-pepper mix and/or hot sauce. Serves 4.

/>   Lard Almighty

  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.