The Best Fried Chicken

Abstract

The Best Fried Chicken Ann Hood (bio) I have massaged it with herbs. Bathed it in buttermilk. Immersed it in water, sugar, and salt. Rolled it in corn flakes, panko, seasoned crumbs. I have spent three days tending to it, double dipping and double dredging and double bathing. Ham has been involved. Also, hot pepper flakes. But now I know that the finest way to make fried chicken is to dust it with heavily salted and peppered flour and fry it in lard until crisp. That’s the way my father did it, and his mother before him. That’s the way they still do it in his part of Indiana, which is to say the southeast corner whose Hoosiers are more Kentucky than Midwest. But like all children when they grow up, I doubted and questioned him and his chicken. I grew too sophisticated, and turned away from everything I once believed to be true. I tasted too many others that had been fried by the likes of Edna Lewis and Sean Brock. I forgot the crunch of that Indiana chicken, its moistness and peppery kick. I forgot until a yearning for people and things I no longer had forced me backward, and brought me home. I have read that Virginia Woolf’s earliest memory was a close-up view of the floral pattern on her mother’s dress on a train trip to St. Ives. The English poet Edwin Muir’s first memory was of his gold and [End Page 1] scarlet baptism suit. American historian Henry Adams remembered the yellow of a kitchen bathed in sunlight. Tolstoy’s first memory was of being swaddled and crying out for freedom. Me, I remember fried chicken. I was three, or maybe four, lying on my back in what we called the way back of our green Chevy station wagon, watching the trees that lined the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia speed past. Every weekend we would get in that station wagon and take a long drive. To the Luray Caverns or Monticello or a glass factory outlet somewhere in West Virginia. And always on these day trips there was a picnic, eaten at a picnic table beneath mountain pines. Always potato salad, bread and butter, plums and peaches. Always fried chicken. My brother Skip, older by five years, tall and solid (our mother bought his clothes in the Husky section at Heck’s Department Store), wore his summer buzz cut and a striped shirt. A Four Seasons song played on the radio—“Rag Doll” or “Big Girls Don’t Cry”—and my mother sang along softly and off-key from the front seat. My father drove. His left arm, the one with the tattoo of an eagle in front of a blazing red setting sun, rested on the sill of the open window, and his fine blond hair fluttered in the hot breeze. We four were displaced. I didn’t know it then, but ever since they’d married a decade earlier my parents had been moving at the whim of the US Navy, for whom my father was a proud Seabee. They’d lived in Naples, Italy, and Annapolis, Maryland, with long stretches in between during which my father was at sea. My mother was homesick for her small hometown in Rhode Island, for the house where her mother still lived, for the nearness of her sisters and brothers, all of them within walking distance of that house on Fiume Street where they’d all been born. I didn’t know that she was still grieving the sudden loss of her favorite sister, Ann-Marie, who had died six years earlier during a routine wisdom tooth extraction. I only knew that my mother had sad eyes, and that it wasn’t uncommon for me to walk down the long hall of our apartment and find her staring out the window and crying. To me, my world was that apartment in Arlington, Virginia, and my family was the four of us—Mom, Dad, Skip, and me. [End Page 2] So I am on my back in the way back of our green Chevy station wagon and my brother in...