Lunch Matters

Apologies for recent radio silence. Actual school work, as well as my friends’ surprising sense of entitlement that I sometimes spend time with them, has intervened. No matter—I’ve returned, and I’m scheming.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the moon shot—a few months late, but who’s really keep track?—I’m considering embarking on a project of my own. It started, in a way, in July, when my mother and I fried chicken at the whim of a smug Italian man. Because it’s fatty, messy and time consuming, it’s a dish we make rarely, and we didn’t know where to start. (All right, fine, the fattiness never stopped us for a minute. More we were afraid of the threat of awful greasiness, a fried chicken pitfall we weren’t quite sure how to skirt.)

“Well,” I began, with trademark eloquence. “If we’re to do this, we should do it right, and get it soaking in buttermilk.”

For what could be more effectively southern than raw meat swimming in seasoned buttermilk, flopping about in a white-fat pool, softening up for a few hours before a dip in the Wesson oil Jacuzzi? In our heads we saw in cubic inches of crispy fried shell, which would crack at lip’s faintest touch to reveal chicken so moist it would make a baby cry. What we got was Tower of Babel Buttermilk Fried Chicken. Forgetting that 350° oil is a bad place for fragile things, we were shocked to see our elaborate breading flake off into nothing on contact with the heat. Like the skull of Dwight D. Eisenhower, our chicken was mostly bare.

I started thinking about fried chicken again a few weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to stop. If a buttermilk extravaganza isn’t the true path, then what is the ideal method? My mother’s investigations have yielded something that should not have surprised me: cooking chicken is like murder, and ’twere well it were done quickly. Most southern cooking is like this. Even a massive production—a crayfish boil, for instance—is at its heart quite simple. The skill of the Tennessee cook is not to build something elaborate, but to cook five classic dishes at once, making no mess, timing them all to the same moment, and having each one taste as good as it has for the last two hundred years.

I fried chicken on Wednesday with this in mind, and was shocked at how easy it is. A guy doesn’t even need a thermometer!

1. Shake rinsed chicken in a little seasoned flour
2. Drop in hot-motherfucking-oil
3. Turn down heat when chicken starts to brown
4. Flip regularly until meat stops sizzling

And that’s it. An hour’s work, and I was eating better fried chicken than downtown Manhattan has ever given me. But then, trouncing the salty, crusty gutter produce that passes for chicken below 14th Street was easy. Matching Prince’s is going to be hard.

Yep. That’s the project. I’m going to spend the six weeks I have until Thanksgiving learning how to make hot chicken, trying different methods (when do we add the heat? During brining? With the flour? As a post-frying paste?!) to mimic that titan of Dickerson Pike. At Thanksgiving, I’ll take a trip out to see how I’m doing, and adjust whatever recipe I’ve come up with accordingly. And so, in the spirit of JFK, I predict that we will be able to match Prince’s hot chicken by Christmas.

Unless my friends and I all die of heart disease first.