So Granny walked out into the yard and went up to a chicken the kids had been playfully chasing moments before, grabbed it by the head, and broke its neck. She did this two or three more times and took them inside to dress them for the next day’s dinner.
For my mother in particular, who, at this point in her very young life, spent her days as a Detroit city kid, this visceral lesson was a hard one. She was deeply shaken and spent the afternoon by herself crying. She didn’t really want fried chicken anymore. She went to bed broken-hearted and suddenly confronted with an adult reality no one prepared her for.
That night, snuggled in her mother’s arms on a small brass bed, she found a moment of sanctuary.
But just as sleep crept toward her and she began to let go of her heartache, she woke to the thin layer of her thin linen blanket being pulled away. She looked down to the end of the bed to see Pap’s black cat looming mischievously in the darkness.
But that couldn’t be.
When Pap, Granny’s husband, Mom’s grandfather, died years before, his cat died with him. That cat wasn’t nice to a single soul in this world but Pap. It followed him around and loved on him while hissing and scratching at everyone else. The morning after Pap suddenly died of a heart attack, his cat was found dead outside his bedroom window for no discernable reason.
Ever since, Pap’s cat haunted that house. Every dark corner convinced you he was curled up there. When something mysteriously fell from a countertop or a rattle from the next room spooked the grandkids, Granny would say, “Oh, that’s just Pap’s cat.”
That night, when Pap’s cat called on Mom, when those two glowing eyes sent a paw up to hook and pull away her blanket, her knees sprung to her chest, and she buried her head in her pillow to quiet the voices of the dead.
But as the next day grew on and her mother and Granny came by with a hug, a pat on the head, and some tender words, Mom began to feel better. Later, as the smell of biscuits baking, greens simmering, and the spatter of lard landing on Granny’s wood stove as it hopped from her cast iron skillet full of slowly crisping chicken filled the small rooms of Granny’s home, Mom’s willingness to understand our nature as omnivores eventually made fried chicken palatable again.
Sometimes, it is more important that the memories and emotions we associate with our favorite foods are more powerful than positive. We all love to give ourselves the warm fuzzies over positive food associations. Still, often, the complex emotional experiences we have that really connect us to our food and end up having the most impact in the most ancient parts of our brains.
Granny was excited to offer her grandkids fried chicken that day because, in Appalachia, fried chicken was special. It’s not something you would make on a whim, and most certainly wasn’t something you could pick up at a gas station for a few bucks. It was hard work and required the luxurious use of scarce resources like lots of rendered fat, wheat flour (which you could not grow yourself in East Tennessee – you had to buy or trade for it), and a yard bird or two, plucked from a population of maybe a dozen.
It was made for occasions and rich moments: when family visited, for holidays, whenever there was something to celebrate. In some families, fried chicken was Sunday dinner (the main meal eaten at midday), when extended family would gather, still in their formal duds, after church. On these days, the fried chicken was cooked the day before since Sunday belonged to Jesus and served the next day at the temperature the Lord provided.
The Appalachian way to cook fried chicken is in a cast iron skillet. Granny, who had no electricity or gas in her home until the 1970s, knew how to stoke her big wood-fired cast iron stove perfectly for whatever she was cooking. She would know if the oven was right for baking a pie with nothing more than a wave of her hand before it.
When she fried chicken, she didn’t have a fancy thermometer, timer, or even a knob on the stove to turn the heat up and down. She didn’t just know when her pan was ready. She knew when her stove was ready, because there wasn’t a day that passed since she was a little girl that she didn’t spend time before it.
Granny’s was not the only deft hand in the mountains, though. Skillet fried chicken was pretty ubiquitous in Appalachia. It was one of the many stellar contributions to American culinary culture originally brought to us by enslaved African Americans. It had such a powerful influence on Southern cooking that by the time I was born, it had been a part of my family’s cooking traditions for generations.
Skillets bubbling with fried chicken in homes dotting the foothills of Kentucky and Tennessee eventually became pervasive enough to draw the attention of people who might not have chickens wandering in their yards. In the 1930s, Harland Sanders developed his secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices alongside his patented invention, the pressure fryer, to take advantage of its burgeoning popularity.
For Harlan, the pressure fryer was the best way to mimic in volume the results you would get from frying chicken in a skillet. This is how fried chicken is cooked at KFC to this day and how we do it at The Southerner. The Colonel can brag all he wants about his secret recipe, but the pressure frying changed the game. As with most things in the kitchen, technique trumps the recipe.
This was very different from how most restaurants, especially deeper in the south, cooked fried chicken. Further south and west, it was battered and deep-fried. Appalachian fried chicken, dry dredged and pan-fried, is about deep, savory flavors more than shatter crisp crust. The Southerner will never apologize for that. It is what the skillet gains you over the deep fryer.
So here’s The Southerner’s dirty little secret: as much as we love pressure fried chicken, the best fried chicken you will ever eat, like so much of southern cooking, is made at home. Pressure frying represents the old ways well but will never truly take us all the way home. That happens on your stovetop in a cast iron skillet.
Stay tuned for the step-by-step recipe for our beloved Nana’s fried chicken in our upcoming newsletter.