A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (22 page)
Read A Love Affair with Southern Cooking Online
Authors: Jean Anderson,Jean Anderson
The best apple is taken by the pig.
—
OLD NORTH CAROLINA SAYING
FRIED CHICKEN WITH GRAVY
MAKES
4
SERVINGS
This recipe was given to me nearly thirty years ago by Garnet McCollum, a North Carolina farm woman I profiled for
Family Circle
magazine. In that article, I featured about a dozen favorite family recipes, among them her superb fried chicken. I cannot improve upon it. Once salted, this chicken is refrigerated overnight, so you must begin the recipe a day ahead. Note:
Back when I interviewed Mrs. McCollum, chicken breasts weren’t D cup in size. Now that they are, I suggest that you halve each breast crosswise so that the chicken cooks more evenly.
One 3-to 3½-pound broiler-fryer, cut up for frying (see Note above)
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¾ cup unsifted all-purpose flour
Vegetable oil for frying or lard, if you can get it (Mrs. McCollum used lard)
1 tablespoon water
Gravy
4 tablespoons skillet drippings
1
/
3
cup unsifted all-purpose flour 2 cups water or milk, if you prefer milk gravy (the McCollums don’t)
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
1
/
8
teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
- 1.
Arrange the pieces of chicken, not touching and one layer deep, in a shallow baking dish or nonreactive pan. Sprinkle with the salt, cover, and refrigerate overnight. - 2.
When ready to fry the chicken, drain off all accumulated juices and pat the chicken dry on several thicknesses of paper toweling. Sprinkle the chicken with the pepper, then dredge by shaking a few pieces at a time in the flour in a plastic zipper bag. As you remove the chicken from the dredging flour, shake off the excess flour. - 3.
Pour the oil into a large iron skillet until about an inch deep, set over moderate heat, and as soon as steam begins to rise from the oil, add the pieces of chicken, skin side down. Fry slowly for 30 minutes, keeping the heat at moderate or moderately low so that the chicken doesn’t overbrown; turn and fry 30 minutes more. Add the 1 tablespoon water (the oil will spit and sputter), cover the skillet, and let stand until the spitting stops. - 4.
Remove the chicken to several thicknesses of paper toweling to drain, arranging so the pieces don’t touch one another. Also lay a sheet of paper toweling on top. - 5.
For the gravy: Pour the oil and drippings from the skillet, then spoon 4 tablespoons of them back into the skillet. Blend in the flour, and cook and stir over moderately low heat for about 5 minutes or until a nice rich brown. Whisk in the water, salt, and pepper, then cook, whisking constantly, for about 5 minutes or until thickened, smooth, and no raw starch taste lingers. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust as needed. Pour the gravy into a heated gravy boat. - 6.
Pile the chicken onto a heated platter and serve. Pass the gravy along with a basket of fresh-baked biscuits.
TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1850s | | The single most prosperous decade for South Carolina rice planters. Many netted $30,000 a year and up—way up—while the average citizen earned just $1,200. |
| | Bavarian Elizabeth Kettering sails to New Orleans for her brother’s wedding, marries a French Market butcher, and opens a little breakfast café. Later widowed, she marries Hypolite Bégué, renames her little café Bégué’s Restaurant, and, according to one theory, creates New Orleans’s famous po’boy sandwich late in the nineteenth century. |
1851 | | Cyrus McCormick’s “Virginia Reaper” not only revolutionizes the harvesting of grain but also wins a gold medal at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. |
1852 | | John Burnside, soon to be nicknamed “The Sugar Prince of Louisiana,” begins buying sugar plantations, amasses more than 12,000 acres of cane fields, and employs more than 2,200 slaves. But he is also the first to hire free African Americans. |
1853 | | To foster economic reform and counter its reputation for archaic agriculture methods, North Carolina stages a state fair in Raleigh. On display: cutting-edge farm equipment. |
COLONEL HARLAND SANDERS (1890–1980) AND KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN
The quintessential “late bloomer,” Harland Sanders was nearly fifty when he perfected his famous fried-chicken recipe and was a Golden Ager of sixty-two when he began franchising it. Available today in more than eighty countries and territories, his “finger lickin’ good” Kentucky Fried Chicken is one of the world’s best-selling fast foods.
After years of bouncing from job to job (farmhand, streetcar conductor, soldier, insurance salesman, steamboat ferry operator, railroad fireman, paralegal), Sanders came home to Corbin, Kentucky, and started the business that would make him both millionaire and celebrity. In the front room of a gas station, no less.
Here, in 1930, Sanders began serving weary travelers the southern dishes he’d learned to cook as a child. People loved his food—especially that fried chicken—and kept coming back for more. To accommodate his increasing number of fans, Sanders moved his tiny café into a motel across the street.
Among those early Sanders Café fans was fellow Kentuckian Duncan Hines, who recommended the place in his
Adventures in Good Eating
. That rave in the 1939 edition of the American motorist’s bible put Sanders’s little Corbin, Kentucky, restaurant on the map.
Yet barely a dozen years later Sanders was out of business. In the 1950s, the government hurled a new interstate right past Corbin. With customers dwindling, Sanders closed his café, auctioned off its equipment, and, after settling his accounts, was reduced to living on his meager monthly Social Security check.
Still believing in his fried chicken with its secret seasoning blend of eleven herbs and spices, Sanders took to the road in 1952. Crisscrossing the country, he called on restaurant owners and fried batches of chicken golden, crisp, and tender for them to taste. Dozens were impressed enough to cut a deal: Sanders would share his secret recipe and frying technique if they’d pay him a nickel for every order sold.
By 1964, there were more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. That same year Harland Sanders sold his stake in KFC for $2 million, but he remained its spokesman until he died in 1980 at the age of ninety. Of course he will live forever as its grinning “Kentucky Colonel” icon.
FRANK PERDUE (1920–2005)
A shy only child born the year his father began raising chickens on a small Maryland farm, beak-nosed, raspy-voiced Frank Perdue emerged in the 1970s as America’s unlikeliest TV pitchman. “It takes a tough man to raise a tender chicken,” he twanged, making Perdue the country’s first brand-name chicken. By the ’90s, he’d built a multi-billion-dollar business.
In the beginning, Perdue’s father raised chickens for eggs, not eating, but he switched to the lucrative broiler business in the 1940s, first wholesale, then retail some twenty years later.
As innovative as he was entrepreneurial, Frank Perdue added marigold petals to chicken feed to give his broilers the golden skin customers preferred. He singed off the wing hairs they hated. He cross-bred Cornish with White Plymouth Rocks to give his broilers plumper breasts. He packed his chickens in ice instead of freezing them. He worked eighteen to twenty hours a day, often sleeping at the office. Frank Perdue believed in his chickens and so did millions of Americans.
With Perdue staying on as chairman of the executive committee, look-alike son Jim took over Perdue Farms, Inc., in 1991. Before long, his “What? Me-obsessed-with-chicken?” commercials were all over the tube. And as amusing as his dad’s.
When Frank Perdue died in 2005 at the age of eighty-four, his Maryland-based company was employing almost 20,000 people and grossing $2.8 billion a year. Hardly chicken feed.
TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1856 | | Gail Borden patents his process for sweetened condensed milk, which he’d developed two years earlier. Although he did so in the North, his sweetened condensed milk had a greater impact in the Deep South, where fresh milk spoiled in a matter of hours. |
1859 | | Cubans are imported to roll cigars in the factories springing up around Tampa, Florida, and their black bean soups and saffron-hued |
1861 | | The opening shot of the Civil War is fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The war will free the slaves and end the South’s planter aristocracy. To this day, Southerners prefer to call it “The War Between the States,” “The War for Southern Independence,” or, even more euphemistically, “The Late Unpleasantness.” |
1862 | | The Café du Monde opens for business in the French Market of New Orleans. It is still there and its beignets and dark coffee-with-chicory are as popular as ever. |
SUPER-CRUNCHY FRIED CHICKEN
MAKES
4
SERVINGS
If you’ve ever wondered what gives fried chicken a super-crunchy crust, I’ve three words for you: self-rising flour. It contains baking powder and when the chicken is dipped into buttermilk, then into self-rising flour, the acid in the milk reacts with the baking powder: You can see it fizz. Then when the chicken goes into 360° F. fat, it fizzes further still. Talking one night with Bill Smith, the chef at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, I learned a couple of his secrets. He fries his chicken in a Dutch oven in just enough oil to float the pieces, and once they begin to brown, he reduces the heat and covers the pot. That way he knows the chicken won’t burn by the time it’s done. Only during the last few minutes does the lid come off. I use a five-inch-deep, enameled cast-iron Dutch oven twelve inches across—just big enough to accommodate all of the chicken at once. Its lid can be set on askew, leaving room for a deep-fat thermometer. Because this chicken is salted, then refrigerated for at least 12 hours, you must begin the recipe a day ahead of time. Note:
After finding no chickens weighing less than four pounds at my grocery, I fussed at the butcher. “Go to the take-out section,” he said. “They may let you have a raw rotisserie chicken. They’re under three pounds.” I did. And they did—something to try the next time you can’t find a small fryer.
One 2½-to 2¾-pound broiler-fryer, cut up for frying (see Note at left)
1½ teaspoons salt
Vegetable oil for deep-fat frying (you’ll need about 8 cups or 2 quarts)
1½ cups buttermilk
1½ cups unsifted self-rising flour
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
½ teaspoon black pepper
- 1.
Arrange the pieces of chicken one layer deep in a large, shallow, nonreactive pan and sprinkle with half the salt. Turn the chicken and sprinkle the flip sides with the remaining salt. Cover and refrigerate for at least 12 hours but for no more than 24. - 2.
When ready to fry the chicken, pour the oil into a large, heavy Dutch oven at least 5 inches deep and 12 inches in diameter. Insert a deep-fat thermometer and set over moderately high heat. Let the oil heat slowly; it may take 35 to 45 minutes for the oil to reach the proper frying temperature of 360° F. - 3.
When the oil reaches 330° to 340° F., pour the buttermilk into a small bowl, then combine the flour, paprika, and pepper in a pie pan. - 4.
Dip each piece of chicken into the buttermilk, then roll in the flour mixture until thickly coated. Arrange the chicken pieces on a foil-lined tray so that they don’t touch. - 5.
As soon as the oil reaches 360° F., ease in the chicken breasts and thighs, then the drum-sticks, wings, and backs, arranging so the pieces don’t touch or barely touch. The oil will sputter and its temperature will plummet to
around 300° F. Not a problem. The initial searing will have sealed the crust. - 6.
Slide the lid onto the Dutch oven, leaving enough room at the edge for the deep-fat thermometer. Continue frying the chicken, raising and lowering the burner heat to keep the temperature of the oil between 290° F. and 300° F. - 7.
After about 10 minutes, lift out a chicken wing and insert an instant-read thermometer in the meatiest part, not touching bone. If it reads 170° F., the wing is done. Remove the other wing, also the backs, and drain on several thicknesses of paper toweling. - 8.
After 15 minutes, test the chicken thighs the same way and if done, drain on paper toweling. After 18 to 20 minutes, the breasts should be done, but test to make sure. - 9.
Cool the chicken about 20 minutes on the paper toweling, then serve warm. Or, if you prefer, cool to room temperature before serving.
TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1863 | | Said to be the year that a French chef serving Kentucky general Henry Hunt Morgan creates a meaty vegetable stew for his Confederate troops. He calls it “burgoo.” Some food historians disagree and call the story completely apocryphal. (See Kentucky Burgoo, Chapter 3.) |
| | Richmond, Virginia, publisher West & Johnston brings out the |
| | Outraged by the soaring price of flour, the women of Richmond, Virginia, stage a “bread riot.” Covering the protest, a local paper calls them “prostitutes, professional thieves, Irish, Yankee hags.” |
| | Virginia is partitioned, its 50 western counties becoming West Virginia. Unlike Virginia, it is pro-Union. |
| | To keep from starving during the prolonged and savage Battle of Vicksburg, the townspeople devour a field of black-eyed peas originally planted as cattle fodder. |