Fried Chicken Read Free Page A

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.”
    Onion-Fried Shore Chicken CAPE MAY, NEW JERSEY
    Onions are all-important to this recipe. They impart sweetness. Or maybe they boost moisture. No matter, the result is a soft crust that tastes like a fusion of chicken skin and baking powder biscuit. While the ladies at the Chalfonte cook their ( continued ) onions until they are blackened, I rely upon a more onerous technique that offers the bonus of chicken-perfumed onion rings.
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    â–  1 chicken, cut into 8 pieces if less than
3 pounds, 10 pieces if more than 3 pounds
■ 2 tablespoons salt
■ 2 tablespoons lemon pepper (the kind
without salt)
■ 1 cup self-rising flour
■ Peanut oil
■ 2 medium onions, peeled and sliced into
¾-inch-thick rings
■ Salt and black pepper for sprinkling
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    Season chicken with 1 tablespoon salt and 1 tablespoon lemon pepper. Mix flour, remaining salt, and remaining lemon pepper in a heavy paper or plastic bag. Add two pieces of chicken at a time, shake to coat thoroughly, and shake again upon removal to loosen excess flour. (Do not discard bag with flour.)
    Remove floured chicken to a wax-paper- or parchment-lined pan. Let rest for 10 minutes. Pour oil into a skillet at a depth of 1½ inches. When oil reaches 350°, place half the onion rings in the skillet. After 3 or 4 minutes, when the hiss from the water in the onions quiets, remove the onions and discard. Place remaining onion rings in a bowl of cold water and set aside.
    Slide dark meat into oil, skin-side down, followed by white meat. Keep oil between 300° and 325° and cook chicken pieces for 12 minutes per side, or until an internal thermometer registers 170° for dark meat, 160° for white. Drain chicken on a wire rack, blotting with paper towels if necessary. Keep oil in skillet. Remove remaining onion rings from water and toss in the flour-filled bag, shaking to coat thoroughly. Fry onion rings in the same oil until brown, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toss atop chicken. Serves 4.
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    Stand Facing the Stove
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    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