B
efore he started cooking hot chicken
in Australia, before he opened his
seventh location of Belles Hot Chicken
and began planning for expansion in
Asia, before he was serving customers
like Chance the Rapper and American
football star Marshawn Lynch, Morgan McGlone
was sitting on a porch in Nashville.
McGlone and friends were eating hot chicken,
cooling their lips with glasses of natural wine, when
he thought, this is how I should make my living. After
an itinerant decade of cooking around the world
and three years learning from American chef Sean
Brock, McGlone was struck with the idea of bringing
Nashville’s most famous dish together with his love
for wild-fermented wines and selling it to the audience
he knew best: Australians.
But, of course, long before McGlone thought
to make money from American-style fried chicken,
there were many, many others.
For at least 150 years, people have been cooking
and selling fried chicken in America. The earliest
were black women, newly freed from slavery after
the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. These
entrepreneurial cooks, known as “waiter carriers”,
brought their skills and their chicken to markets and
train stations to sell to travellers passing through towns
like Gordonsville, Virginia. They sold chicken to
support themselves and their families, because that
was the work that was available to them.
Though their culinary contributions
went uncredited for centuries, African
and African American cooks were
largely responsible for creating what
Americans now know as Southern
food. From the mid-18th century
through Emancipation, dishes like fried
chicken were developed and prepared
by enslaved cooks, who combined West
African culinary traditions with those
of indigenous North American peoples
and European colonialists.
In the early 19th century, white
members of high society like Mary
Randolph, a distant relative to Thomas
Jefferson, wrote cookbooks that
commandeered the recipes of black
cooks. The books were a revelation
to white audiences at the time and
helped launch dishes like fried chickento widespread popularity.
Meanwhile, notes writer Adrian
Miller in his book Soul Food:
The Surprising Story of an
American Cuisine One Plate at
a Time, African Americans who
perfected this dish under inhumane conditions were
subject to repugnant stereotypes about their affinity for
fried chicken. After being forced through servitude to
cook for landowners, and later relegated by circumstance
to sell fried chicken for a living, African Americans were
depicted in advertisements, postcards, newspapers and
flyers as chicken thieves and animalistic consumers of
fried chicken – images and stereotypes that persist today.
It’s why many black people in America still refuse to eat
fried chicken in public, carrying the stigma with them
even if they’ve never seen the images in person.
In spite of these indignities, fried chicken didn’t
disappear within black communities. In fact, it spread
even further as part of the six decades-long Great
Migration, during which at least six million African
Americans fled a turbulent and segregated South to start
anew in northern and western cities. As scholar Psyche
Williams-Forson documented in Building Houses out of
Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, these men,
women and children were prohibited from using most
train accommodations along their trip, so they prepared
fried chicken from recipes designed to withstand the
long journey, boxed it up cold, and carried it on board
for sustenance. When they arrived in their new homes,
fried chicken was a special Sunday meal – a place it
occupied for much of the early 20th century.
Then, a few years after World War II, Harland
Sanders turned a single restaurant in Kentucky, where
he served pressure-fried chicken, into a full-fledged Morgan McGlone, of Belles Hot Chicken, sells far more than
hot chicken. Even in Australia, writes OSAYI ENDOLYN,
this is a dish that runs right back to its Southern roots.
Morgan McGlone.
Opposite: Belles Hot
Chicken wings with Old
Bay fries and pickles.GOURMET TRAVELLER 77