Food & Wine USA - (06)June 2020

22 JUNE 2020

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THESE DAYS, to eat the best fried chicken in the world, I have to

fly two hours to Cincinnati, then rent a car and drive 50 miles

to southeastern Indiana. But it wasn’t always that way. All I

used to have to do was walk into my parents’ kitchen in West

Warwick, Rhode Island, where, on many Sunday mornings, my

father would be standing over the electric fryolator with a beer

in one hand and a spatula in the other, waiting to turn a piece

of chicken. This chicken has only three ingredients: flour, salt,

and pepper. We kept a metal canister with COFFEE stamped on

it filled with that mixture. Dad would scoop some into a brown

paper bag, add the chicken one piece at a time, give it a good

shake, then set it on the tray to wait its turn in the fryolator.

Bubbling inside that fryolator was lard. In Dad’s hometown

of Greensburg, Indiana, we’d go with my Aunt Mag to the

butcher to get it fresh. At home in Rhode Island, we bought it

at Stop & Shop in a blue box in the dairy section. The magic of

the fried chicken had more to do with the flour mixture than

the lard; at a certain point, probably due to high cholesterol,

we switched to vegetable oil, and the difference was negligible.

Added to that flour was more salt than seems prudent and way

more pepper than anyone would ever put in almost anything,

which made our fried chicken less golden than most, more

gray-flecked.

In summer, the fried chicken went into a picnic basket beside

a bowl of potato salad and another of cherries or plums for

lunch at the beach. In fall and winter, it was served with cream

gravy and mashed potatoes at the kitchen table. Come spring,

we’d sit in the yard and eat it at the picnic table under the cherry

tree, pink blossoms falling into our Kool-Aid.

After my father fried the chicken, he placed it in a big red

Midwestern Delight Why three-ingredient Indiana

fried chicken is worth a cross-country trek

By Ann Hood

THE ODE

photography by VICTOR PROTASIO

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