Fried Chicken (07-21-08)

This week I got to spend a little quality time with my own children. My wife left for a few days to visit friends in Ohio, and I got a small taste of single parenthood.

I used to be a very able bachelor, capable of cooking for myself. Living with the world’s best wife has kept me out of practice, except for grilling burgers and steaks.

One night in the midst of this “vacation,” I had a hankering for fried chicken. Now, like many people, I come from a long line of great fried chicken makers. My dad’s mom, Granma Goodwin, was famous in our clan for her fried chicken dinners, which she cooked roughly every Sunday. My mom spent years trying to win the coveted best fried chicken honor, and succeeded when she discovered a recipe that called for soaking the chicken in buttermilk for half a day before frying.

I didn’t have that kind of time. The kids and I were hungry, and besides I was using boneless chicken thighs, so I really looking to make chicken strips.

Now even though it had been ten years since I last fried any chicken, I remembered the basic premise. Dip the chicken in a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper, and fry. Got it.

However, I remembered that my fried chicken was always either pretty bland, or way too salty. As I recollect, I never could get the mixture of salt, pepper and flour quite right.

So I hit the cookbooks. To my amazement, I discovered, that among all the chicken recipes I found, I didn’t find one recipe for plain old fried chicken.

I occurred to me the reason for this obvious omission probably had to do with the fact that fried chicken, as a recipe, is something that is passed along verbally from parent to child. Anyone who has any cooking experience knows how to fry a chicken, so much so that the publishers of the cookbooks we own did not find it worth their time, ink, or paper to print such a basic, familiar recipe.

That is when it hit me: the person who I usually turned to in times like these was my mom. This dilemma would have been right up her alley, and as I thought about such phone calls I had made to her in the past, I could almost hear her joy at being asked for help.

I don’t know if it is the same for all mothers, but as I remember, my mom seemed to love it best whenever I called asking for help. I was too independent to ask much, but when I cooked for myself I often called mom for assistance.

In fact several of the cookbooks I scoured for a fried chicken recipes were from my mom. Growing up, I remember often helping her in the kitchen with preparing a meal. In the kitchen, my mom was a masterful teacher, and it was her lessons that kept me from starving once I was out on my own. It was her advice and sage wisdom in all things culinary that allowed me to impress the woman I would eventually marry with several big meals. It was why my wife felt she could take a mini-vacation and trust I wouldn’t just drown our children in peanut butter sandwiches.

The more I thought about it, the more I missed mom. Time spent in the kitchen talking about food, or on the phone in the kitchen talking about food, were among the best times I knew with her. Cooking and food formed a common bond, a vital link passed down from one generation to the next.

I eventually found a recipe for “Fried Pheasant Fingers,” which although didn’t specify the proportions of salt, pepper, and flour, did specify that the meat should be dipped in eggs first, and to use seasoning salt instead of salt and pepper. It wasn’t bad…although it certainly wasn’t the fried chicken I grew up enjoying.

When I told my wife this story, she reminded me that I still have one mom remaining…my mother-in-law in Quinter. I know from many wonderful meals served from her kitchen that she also knows the art of great fried chicken. So next time, I’ll call her. It won’t be the same, but nothing ever stays the same.

Not even recipes for fried chicken.