Still, when I was kid and first learned my way around the kitchen, the sense was that part of the beauty of fried chicken was its simplicity--some flour, egg, salt, pepper, and maybe some kind of herbalism. If you were fancy you had thyme, but most negroes were fine with Season-All. Hook up some potato salad real quick, and you were on.
These days, when I look up a fried chicken recipe it tends to be a 48-hour affair including brining, buttermilk, bay-leaves, and double-binding. When did this happen?When I first started trying to fry chicken I would read about brining and double-brining and battering and double-battering and potato chips as crust etc. "Wrap it in a pizza, bury it in the backyard, move to another city, come back in 6 weeks, dig bird up and fry" and on and on. Eventually I realized that just as with the imaginary world I had created within my head wherein storylines and characters were getting harder and harder (heh heh heh) to keep track of, the simpler I made it, the better it was.
What is it about people up North not being able to fry a chicken? Every mother in my hometown could whip up a fried chicken dinner at the drop of a hat. They could have no money, no stove and only 7 minutes; somehow next thing you know you're neck deep in great chicken and biscuits. Of course, the one woman in town who COULDN'T make fried chicken? My mother...who was from, TA-DA! ......the North.Case in point? Matt Yglesias, born and raised in upper Manhattan, tries to comment on THC's post and basically says nothing.
Luckily for me I am neither Southern nor Northern, so in straddling the fence I could eventually make good, simple fried chicken.
Hey, what this guy says!
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