Fried Chicken Read Free

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.
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    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.”
    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