How the humble potato changed the world.Still, there are some clues to support a Scottish origin theory. A quintessential “American” food might actually be Scottish? Mariani raised an intriguing possibility, but unfortunately, he didn't offer any proof for his musings. Of course, the dish’s history starts much earlier, but this recipe set the fried chicken standard for generations of Southern cooks.
“Cut them up as for the fricassée, dredge them well with flour, sprinkle them with salt, put them into a good quantity of boiling lard and fry them a light brown,” she wrote. The US’ first widely accepted printed recipe for fried chicken appeared in 1824 in the first regional American cookbook, The Virginia House-Wife, authored by Mary Randolph, a white woman from a slaveholding family and a distant relative of Thomas Jefferson. Since West African culinary traditions remain a mystery to so many, some saw the building blocks for fried chicken and leapt to the wrong conclusion. It was more like a fricassee, where chicken was lightly fried and then braised for a much longer time in a seasoned sauce – similar to Senegalese chicken yassa. However, West Africans didn't make fried chicken the same way many Southerners traditionally did. Some culinary experts linked such expertise to West Africa where, for several centuries prior to European contact, local populations ate chicken and deep fried their food. Southerners made it a centrepiece of their regional cuisine and boasted that only African Americans, mostly enslaved, could make “authentic” fried chicken. What I found was quite surprising.įrom the 17th to 19th Centuries, conventional wisdom designated the American South as fried chicken’s native habitat. And to put Southern fried chicken in the proper culinary and cultural context, I studied cookbooks from cuisines around the world, looking at all the different ways that it’s made. For the sake of in-depth “research” on the subject, I ate at 150 restaurants located in 35 cities and 15 states across the country. In my book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, I wrote about the history of traditional African American cuisine rooted in the Southern US and dedicated an entire chapter to fried chicken. I, too, am a holy altar acolyte of the bird. Now, Americans down 99lb of chicken each year – far more than beef (57lb) or pork (53lb). In fact, according to the US’ National Chicken Council, the average American ate 28lb of chicken in 1960. It later transitioned to something that people ate for breakfast or dinner a couple of times a week, and these days, it’s become so widely available that people eat it whenever the mood strikes. Until World War Two, fried chicken in the US was considered a food for special occasions.
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