The restorative power of grocery-store fried chicken is undeniable.
Writer revisits his poultry past before National Fried Chicken Day, July 6
Back when I drank, food saved my life on only a few occasions. More often the solution to an excessive night of drinking was silence, water, Advil and maybe a 44 oz. fountain Diet Coke. And an absence of light.
But once — a moment from the drinking days that has become mythical in my mind — fried chicken flapped in to rescue me.
I don’t really do people. So years ago social situations grew easier with the drink. Imagine a social anxiety but put in a setting full of children and strangers and semi-strangers. A school camping trip, on a sweltering September day at Double Lake just north of the city. I also don’t do camping.
We’d brought some boxed wine (so as to not violate the no-glass rule), and I gradually siphoned that wine from the plastic bladder within the box to my own organic storage system.
I woke the next morning with a lightning-bolt headache and without a Diet Coke, my usual chemical-based source of equilibrium. So I drove to nearby Brookshire Brothers in Coldspring. There I grabbed a 2-liter of Diet Coke. I was grabbed almost immediately by the smell of recently fried chicken. The store wasn’t that large, so the scent lightly lifted up to the corners of the building and fell again like a light rain, enveloping anyone passing by on a Saturday morning for some less heavenly thing: charcoal, beer, flip-flops, hot dogs. The stuff of Saturdays.
The scent from the explosive reaction between flour and fat triggered some sensory space that had been dulled by drinking.
Things started looking up for this camper.
I ordered a four-piece. A leg, a wing and a thigh for me, and a breast that I thought I’d bring back to my wife. She’d had some of the box of wine the night before. But a more modest share.
I finished the entire fourpiece in the car, and went back in for a 20-piece, still too hungover to feel ashamed.
Surely somebody else at camp would want in on this magical food.
Back at the site, upon its placement on the picnic table, the chicken disappeared.
People love breakfast chicken. Not all people. But a lot of them.
It made me think. Not at that exact moment because my mind was just shedding the hangover like dead skin peeling after a sunburn. The thinking would come later.
I come from a high-cholesterol family. Despite a Bluegrass State upbringing and a family with multiple designated Kentucky Colonels, I wasn’t a regular KFC patron because of bad genes. Fried chicken always had dark familial connotations. Perhaps it’s a stretch to compare their standing to that of drugs. Certainly not the drugs that could kill you instantly. But the long-tail drugsthat whittle away the years at the end.
My decade in New York yielded a variety of fried chicken. Brooklyn had a number of places that were hyper-local while still trying to sponge some market from a national chain with which they could never truly compete: Kennedy Fried Chicken, Kansas Fried Chicken, Kirby’s Fried Chicken.
Some were great. Some were fine. With fried chicken, at the right moment, fine is often subtly sublime.
None were as good as that made by my late grandmother-in-law, who was a Cajun. She had a system for making her chicken, so to describe it as “voodoo” would be reductive. That said, she did something when eyes were elsewhere because the results were special. I saw her mise en place, and she used no exotic ingredients.
The most indelible moment occurred when she couldn’t remember if she’d salted the drumsticks. How would you deal with this? I’ll tell you how she did: She picked up a raw chicken leg and licked it like a popsicle. She decided it hadn’t been salted and proceeded to salt it.
I recognize fried chicken has moved into a designer territory, and I’ve sampled some of the results. They range from very good to transcendent. Some of this chicken is fussy, some of it is rudimentary. None of it is bad, unless it has rested beneath a heat lamp too long. Even then, it’s still better than fruit or vegetables. I mean, it’s not. But it is.
And despite being drinkfree, my magical hangover chicken has become a friend I visit from time to time. Once I found magical gas-station chicken. I don’t recall if it was Burnside or Laplace or some Louisiana town in between. I figured I could look it up. “It’s where the river bends,” I thought. Then I looked at a map.
That chicken left an imprint that lingers two years later.
Even in town, if you go at the right time — before it sits too long — Randalls offers its own fine basket of fried chicken. The crust has a reliable crunch. The meat is usually still juicy and tender. Results vary based on time of day. But that’s on the buyer. Under the bright heat lamp, you can tell when fried chicken has lost its luster.
I’m not saying you can’t do better than the cheapest of fried chicken.
I’m just saying sometimes on a Saturday morning you need to buy laundry detergent. And sometimes you come home with laundry detergent.
And maybe also a basket of grocery-store fried chicken.