Fried Chicken Read Free Page B

1965.
    Ruby Pearl Dowda did not march at Selma. She did not lock arms with fellow protesters and sing “We Shall Overcome.” But when she saw news reports of trouble down in Birmingham, she gathered eggs from her chicken house, pulled a few hens from the flock, and fried batches of chicken, baked pans of cornbread.
    When her men were down in the mines, she took the train into Birmingham and, as the movement flared around her, walked the streets, handing out box lunches tied with twine. “She gave them to every black child who looked hungry,” recalls her granddaughter, “to every white child who needed to eat.”

THREE

    Pahovana Piletina, That’s Fried Chicken to You
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    it’s a little past noon on Sunday in the burg of Barberton, in north-central Ohio. Church just let out. Traffic on Wooster Street, the main drag, is bumper to bumper, Ford to Chevy. At a wood-paneled corner restaurant known as White House Chicken, a middle-aged woman named Darlene holds forth at a corner table.
    â€œI’ll tell you one thing,” she says, shaking her finger alternately at her mother, her husband, me. In her other hand is a chicken breast. “The people at Village Inn fry too dark. The coleslaw at Belgrade Gardens is too watery. I don’t like the fries at Hopocan Gardens. This is my place. . . . I’ve been eating chicken at White House for more than forty years, been coming here after church since I was a baby, and I’m telling you that this is what Barberton chicken is supposed to taste like.”
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    working-class Barberton has been heralded at various times as home of America’s largest sewer tile kiln and the match-manufacturing capital of the world. But allegiances are now sworn and epithets hurled in the name of whose bird is freshest, whose crust is crispest. Here fried chicken hearkens back to Serbia, where Smilka Topalsky, the widely acknowledged progenitor of the Barberton chicken phenomenon, was born just north of Belgrade. I came here, hard on the heels of my time in New Jersey, in search of exemplary fried chicken and tales of immigrant life.
    Smilka and her husband Milos were accidental restauranteurs. Saddled with debt during the Great Depression, the second-generation Ohioans ceded the family dairy farm on the outskirts of town to the tax collector. But in a typical immigrant bootstrap story, Smilka cooked the family back to solvency by way of bread-crumb-coated fried chicken, vinegary coleslaw, a kind of tomato-rice slurry known as hot sauce, and lard-fried potatoes, served first in the family home and later, around 1933, in the family restaurant, Belgrade Gardens. Topalsky lore holds that these dishes were exacting replications of what Smilka and Milos knew in the Old Country as something like pahovana piletina, kupus salata, djuvece, and pomfrit, respectively.
    Some natives carp that the dishes were not as true to Old World form as the Topalskys and their boosters would have you believe. And to a certain extent, they have a point, for chicken paprikash might have been a more likely crossover contender than fried chicken, and Belgrade Gardens’ distinctive hot sauce recalls nothing so much as a spicy riff on TV-dinner-style Spanish rice. But the story of American fried chicken is a tale of assimilation and adaptation. Bread-crumb-coated meat cutlets and poultry parts are staples of many European traditions, from the cookery of Milan to that of Vienna. Such takes on the fried chicken theme become distinctly American as one generation begets the next, as crumbs made with Old World breads are supplanted by pouches sold by Pepperidge Farm.
    Over time, the foods that emerged from Smilka Topalsky’s kitchen came to be considered core elements of the Barberton chicken story—embraced by all manner of recently immigrated Croats and Hungarians and Slovaks as not so much Serbian, but American. Soon, German and Irish immigrants