A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [74]
One 3-to 3½-pound broiler-fryer, cut up for frying (see Note above)
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¾ cup unsifted all-purpose flour
Vegetable oil for frying or lard, if you can get it (Mrs. McCollum used lard)
1 tablespoon water
Gravy
4 tablespoons skillet drippings
1/3 cup unsifted all-purpose flour 2 cups water or milk, if you prefer milk gravy (the McCollums don’t)
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/8 teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
1. Arrange the pieces of chicken, not touching and one layer deep, in a shallow baking dish or nonreactive pan. Sprinkle with the salt, cover, and refrigerate overnight.
2. When ready to fry the chicken, drain off all accumulated juices and pat the chicken dry on several thicknesses of paper toweling. Sprinkle the chicken with the pepper, then dredge by shaking a few pieces at a time in the flour in a plastic zipper bag. As you remove the chicken from the dredging flour, shake off the excess flour.
3. Pour the oil into a large iron skillet until about an inch deep, set over moderate heat, and as soon as steam begins to rise from the oil, add the pieces of chicken, skin side down. Fry slowly for 30 minutes, keeping the heat at moderate or moderately low so that the chicken doesn’t overbrown; turn and fry 30 minutes more. Add the 1 tablespoon water (the oil will spit and sputter), cover the skillet, and let stand until the spitting stops.
4. Remove the chicken to several thicknesses of paper toweling to drain, arranging so the pieces don’t touch one another. Also lay a sheet of paper toweling on top.
5. For the gravy: Pour the oil and drippings from the skillet, then spoon 4 tablespoons of them back into the skillet. Blend in the flour, and cook and stir over moderately low heat for about 5 minutes or until a nice rich brown. Whisk in the water, salt, and pepper, then cook, whisking constantly, for about 5 minutes or until thickened, smooth, and no raw starch taste lingers. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust as needed. Pour the gravy into a heated gravy boat.
6. Pile the chicken onto a heated platter and serve. Pass the gravy along with a basket of fresh-baked biscuits.
* * *
TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1850s
The single most prosperous decade for South Carolina rice planters. Many netted $30,000 a year and up—way up—while the average citizen earned just $1,200.
Bavarian Elizabeth Kettering sails to New Orleans for her brother’s wedding, marries a French Market butcher, and opens a little breakfast café. Later widowed, she marries Hypolite Bégué, renames her little café Bégué’s Restaurant, and, according to one theory, creates New Orleans’s famous po’boy sandwich late in the nineteenth century.
1851
Cyrus McCormick’s “Virginia Reaper” not only revolutionizes the harvesting of grain but also wins a gold medal at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London.
1852
John Burnside, soon to be nicknamed “The Sugar Prince of Louisiana,” begins buying sugar plantations, amasses more than 12,000 acres of cane fields, and employs more than 2,200 slaves. But he is also the first to hire free African Americans.
1853
To foster economic reform and counter its reputation for archaic agriculture methods, North Carolina stages a state fair in Raleigh. On display: cutting-edge farm equipment.
* * *
* * *
COLONEL HARLAND SANDERS (1890–1980) AND KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN
The quintessential “late bloomer,” Harland Sanders was nearly fifty when he perfected his famous fried-chicken recipe and was a Golden Ager of sixty-two when he began franchising it. Available today in more than eighty countries and territories, his “finger lickin’ good