by John T. Edge
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.
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’ ap
petizer 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.
Sweet-Tea Fried Chicken
WALLAND, TENNESSEE
John Fleer is a thinking man’s chef, a onetime doctoral candidate in religion who chucked it all for a career in the kitchen. One of the best ideas to spring from his mind is this brined chicken, which manages to pay tribute to the traditional South of days past and the multicultural South still on the horizon.
■ 8 chicken leg quarters, cut into thighs and
drumsticks
■ 1 quart brewed tea, double strength
■ 1 lemon, quartered
■ 1 cup sugar
■ ½ cup kosher salt
■ 1 quart ice water
■ 3 cups all-purpose flour
■ 2 cups cornflour (or fish fry)
■ 2 tablespoons Old Bay seasoning
■ 1 tablespoon chili powder
■ 1 teaspoon salt
■ 1 teaspoon pepper
■ 8 eggs
■ 1 cup buttermilk
■ Peanut oil
Combine tea, lemon, sugar, and kosher salt, and simmer for 5 minutes or until salt and sugar are completely dissolved. Pour in ice water and cool brine completely. Submerge thighs and drumsticks in brine for 48 hours. (continued)
Remove to a wire rack and allow chicken to drain. Combine 2 cups of the flour and the cornflour, Old Bay, chili powder, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Place remaining 1 cup flour in a medium bowl, and in a third bowl beat eggs with buttermilk. Line up bowls of flour, egg-buttermilk mixture, and flour-cornflour mixture, in that order. Coat the chicken in the flour, then the egg-buttermilk mixture, and then the flour-cornflour mixture, applying pressure to ensure even adherence. Let the chicken sit in the refrigerator for ½ hour before frying.
Pour oil into a heavy pot at a depth of at least 3 inches. Heat oil to 300°. Fry chicken, submerged in oil, for 15 minutes, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white meat. Drain on a rack. Cool to room temperature, and then place in refrigerator for at least 4 hours and no more than 24. Serve cool from a picnic basket or cold, straight from the fridge. Serves 8.
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.
Appendix
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.
Thoughts on Technique
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.
Thoughts on Ingredients
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.