My mama poured as much or more love into her fried chicken as she did Crisco lard. And you can be sure as she started to get her big cast-iron skillet ready for the fried chicken, she’d scoop out big serving spoon size portions of Crisco. So, needless to say, there was a lot of love that went into her fried chicken.
Mama grew up on fried chicken. She was raised on a farm and raising chickens was part of farm life when she was a young girl. Often the hens in the coop would hatch out baby chicks. Other times, if not enough baby chicks had hatched, her mom would order the baby chicks in early spring and they’d be delivered by the mailman to their farmhouse. By the time summer arrived, the pullets were old enough to be killed, plucked, and put into a pan of grease to make fried chicken. In fact, Mama says they had fried chicken every day during the summer. We–with a more particular palate and a taste for more items on the menu–find it difficult to imagine the same dish every day of the summer. Times sure have changed.
Mama learned to fry chicken from her mama, who also grew up on the same farm with chickens in the yard. I remember my grandmother telling me that when she was a little girl on the farm she’d occasionally see one or several Native American men come up from the riverbanks of the Brazos River and run into the yard, hurriedly grab one of the chickens and make off with it. She would be frightened, but her mom always would say to her, “Don’t be scared of him. He’s just hungry.” That story still moves me.
Mama brought the skill she learned from her mama into her own kitchen when she married my dad and when she began to have her own family. We often had fried chicken, not an every day item, but every week for sure. In the early years, Mama would do as she had seen done on the farm. She would order baby chicks through the mail. You can the excitement in our house the day the mailman brought that large, rectangular box to the house and we little kids could hear the chirp of the baby chicks inside it. We would rush to open the box, taking the light yellow chicks out of their straw beds and holding them gently in our hands. While we might be allowed to play with them for a short while, they were moved soon enough to the small chicken coop to the west of our house. Some years later, Mama used an old empty railroad car as her chicken coop. It worked alright, but it not easy to climb into it since there were not steps to use. We’d have to pull ourselves into the railroad car by our hands. Often, it took several tries to hoist ourselves into the dark interior.
Personally, I never cared for the day when the chickens would meet their end. Not only because it was a busy day, but because it had sights and sounds that just weren’t pleasant to digest. Sometimes Mama would have a cousin come help her clean the chickens. As we grew older, we would help. The only fun part was at the start–when we tried to catch the chicken. We straightened out clothes hangers and would use the hook on the end to try to snag one of the chicken’s legs. It may sound easy, but it wasn’t. But that’s where the fun ended. Once caught, the chicken’s head would be placed on a wooden block and, usually with an an ax, would suffer the same fate as the royal heads in Revolutionary France placed on the guillotine. My mama’s cousin didn’t need an ax. She was skilled in twisting the head off, making little fuss about the blood pouring out as she did so. There is something about a decapitated chicken that dances around the yard spouting blood from where its head once was that makes an impression on a child’s sensibilities. Maybe I just was an over-sensitive child. But the image has stayed with me. So has the phrase, “Running around like a chicken with its head chopped off.”
The other part of the process that bothered my sensitivities was the scalding of the carcass by submerging it into boiling water. There is no smell quite like wet feathers. Then the plucking of the feathers began, a job that we children handled better than the decapitation. As we worked, the pile of feathers would rise like a snowman made of feathers. Of course, the summer breeze often lifted feathers off the pile and blew them hither and thither, covering the yard and making the place look like a feather factory that made pillows.
The final part was the singing of any small feathers on an open fire until the chicken was naked as Adam on creation day. The gutting was done by one of the adults. I don’t feel a description is necessary. Then a good scrub down and the chicken was ready to be put into bags to freeze. Usually, a couple of them were brought into the kitchen for that day’s lunch. Back in the day when freezers weren’t available, the whole process was repeated each day when chickens were fried for lunch. That much practice made people quite skilled at the task. In later years, of course, Mama just bought the fryers at the grocery store. Somebody else had done the prep work. I was happy to let them do it.
There is the old joke about the chicken talking to the pig one day and suggesting they provide ham and eggs for breakfast at the nearby eating place. The pig thinks about it and says to the chicken, “I don’t know about it. You see, for you it just takes involvement, but for me it takes a commitment.” In this instance, we safely can say the chicken has made a commitment also. Watching this process, we can’t sit down at the dinner table without a new understanding that sacrifice–at all levels–has put food on our table. Maybe that’s why we should remember to say grace before we eat.
Mama believed there were a couple things necessary to make a decent pan of fried chicken, the first being the fire on the stove. My dad, never one to mince words, always said Mama didn’t cook unless she built a fire underneath a pan. There was truth in the statement because Mama was convinced that good fried chicken required a good fire, so she got as much fire under her frying pan as she could. As she put those heavily-floured chicken pieces into the pan, you’d see the grease popping like firecrackers on the 4th of July. It made for a very warm kitchen. When Daddy got mama one of those new electric stoves with the flat surface, Mama complained that she couldn’t get the fire hot enough to fire chicken. Later, she went back to a gas stove where she could have her fire as high as she wanted it.
But the final product was worth all the steps that led up to it–even the brutal ones. Mama’s fried chicken was the best. It was crispy, which gave it a special texture. She heavily peppered and salted it in the pan, which made it flavorful. She fried it just the right amount of time, not under-cooked and not overcooked. My mama was an all-around good cook, but her fried chicken, I would say, was her specialty. We were excited whenever we had it on the table. Mama also fixed fried chicken for every special occasion, such as the annual school trip to Seymour Park. We’d have fried chicken in our little boxes when we’d stop from playing at midday to have lunch. She’d make fried chicken when she took us–and later, the grandchildren–for one of her spur-of-the-moment picnics. We’d have fried chicken every Sunday for lunch. The local pastor made our table his regular stop after he had finished his last service. I remember one Sunday when Mama had fixed a roast. He was disappointed that the menu had changed. After that, Mama went back to the regular menu.
Towards the end of her life, Mama couldn’t fry chicken anymore. Up in her eighties, she stayed at the kitchen stove as long as she could. One hip replacement made it tough to do the cooking; the second hip replacement ended her days behind the stove. Two of my sisters asked her to teach them how to fry chicken the way she did. (She also taught me how to cut up a chicken, but I’m not good at anything that requires a frying pan.) Thank God my sisters were interested enough to want to hold onto the skill or art, however you choose to see it. And whenever either of them makes fried chicken for us, it is a special day. Special because fried chicken always brings back memories of Mama. Special because their friend chicken is almost as good as hers. (Maybe it is as good, but because it isn’t Mama’s, it just doesn’t taste exactly the same as hers.) Special because fried chicken is a big part of our family history. Regardless, homemade fried chicken will always be my favorite food. I rarely eat fried chicken at the few commercial places that offer it. It’s a very poor second, in my opinion, and expectations never meet reality when I bite into a piece of it.
I often think of that passage in the book, “Franny and Zooey.” The college age Zooey is having a spiritual crisis. Her brother at some point becomes impatient with her moodiness and her self-imposed asceticism. When their mom brings Zooey a bowl of chicken soup in the hope it will help her feel better and Zooey refuses to eat it, Franny launches a verbal (and well-deserved) attack on his sister. He says to his sister, “You don’t even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup–which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse. So just tell me, just tell me, buddy . . . How in the hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?” Franny’s point, of course, is that their mom’s chicken soup is consecrated or made holy because of the love and care that she puts into the effort of making and serving it. And if Zooey can’t see that fact, then she won’t be able to see anything holy in front of her face.
Everybody still talks about Colonel Sander’s secret recipe for his fried-chicken. supposedly made up of eleven herbs and spices and handwritten on a piece of paper that is kept locked in a vault at the KFC corporate headquarters in Louisville so nobody can ever replicate it. I think of all the intrigue surrounding that recipe, In my mind, Mama’s fried chicken always was better than the Colonel’s. Furthermore, her recipe only had one secret ingredient, which wasn’t so secret. That ingredient was love. When Mama fried chicken, she made sure lots of love went into it.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 