American fried chicken has its origins in slavery

By Josie Delap

People serve chimaek in Korea: fried chicken with beer. In Japan you get karaage, nuggets of chicken marinated in soy sauce and garlic before being fried in a coating of wheat flour. Start with a citrus-based marinade and you’re on your way to Guatemalan fried chicken. America’s southern fried chicken is delicious but it is not, objectively, better than any other iteration. Yet it is American fried chicken, that of the American South to be precise, which has taken over the world.

The global reach of southern fried chicken is largely thanks to the efforts of a bearded colonel in a white suit and his secret blend of herbs and spices. But the dish’s history is far older than the self-styled colonel, and more fraught than his bland grin might suggest.

The origins of American fried chicken probably lie somewhere between Scotland and west Africa. The 145,000-odd Scots who made their way to the American South in the 18th century brought with them a tradition of battering and frying chicken. The almost half a million west Africans enslaved in North America brought a knack for frying and braising chicken from their own cuisines. It was these African-Americans, many of whom were forced to work in the kitchens of slave plantations, who perfected the art of frying chicken.

Most preferred beef and pork, and did not regard chicken as a proper meat

In this era chicken was a seasonal dish. Young, tender birds, ready in the spring, were best for frying. The cooking process was laborious. Once a bird was selected, it had to be caught, killed, scalded, plucked, gutted, singed to remove any final feathers and butchered. Only then could it be floured, seasoned and fried.

Two methods of frying chicken developed in America, in Virginia and Maryland. Mary Randolph was a white woman from a slaveholding family in Richmond, Virginia, and author of the first regional American cookbook, “The Virginia House-Wife”. She favoured frying the meat in a deep pot of bubbling lard. Published in 1824, her recipe appears to be the first one printed for southern fried chicken. On the other side of the Potomac river in Maryland, cooks preferred to shallow-fry the bird in a cast-iron skillet covered with a lid, serving it with a white gravy.

Chickens were not highly prized at the time. Colonial landowners rarely bothered to include them in their farm inventories. Most preferred beef and pork, and did not regard chicken as a proper meat. Instead it was considered suitable sustenance for sick men and those with weak constitutions, writes Emelyn Rude in “Tastes like Chicken: A History of America’s Favourite Bird”.

Thus it was that when, in 1741, the Carolinas revised their slave code to make it illegal for slaves to own pigs, cows or horses, chickens were omitted. The rest of the South soon introduced similar laws. Chickens, left to scratch around dung heaps and yards, became increasingly important to slaves, some of whom traded their eggs, feathers and meat.

During the civil war in the 1860s, it became increasingly hard to find enough food for soldiers, especially those on the Confederate side. Chickens became more valuable and their theft more common. Doctors, ministers, German factory workers, Italian chefs and even Mark Twain were accused of such crimes. The only ones prosecuted, however, were black Americans. In 1876 a black woman in Virginia was accused of stealing a chicken. As part of the evidence the mother hen was brought to court to identify her offspring. She convinced the court that she recognised her brood: as a result of the chicken’s testimony, the woman received 39 lashes.

A bird had to be caught, killed, scalded, plucked, gutted, singed and butchered, then floured, seasoned and fried

This crime became a focus for racial prejudice. By the 1800s the link between black people and chicken stealing was firmly established in the minds of white Americans. “The Chicken Question” became the subject of great debate. Why, as an article in the New York Times put it in 1882, “in the breast of every coloured man” was there “a mysterious, powerful and ineradicable yearning for chickens”?

The piece continued: “He feels in every fibre of his being that chickens were created for the benefit of the coloured race, and that he is justified in seizing them wherever he may find them.” Without them, African-Americans “would probably pine and die”.

The American history of fried chicken isn’t entirely bleak. In the late 19th century Gordonsville in Virginia became known as the fried-chicken capital of the world. The town was a major stop on two railway lines at a time when trains didn’t have dining cars. After the civil war, newly freed African-American women sold fried chicken to passengers, passing them up from the platform through train windows. Fried chicken brought such women economic independence, argues Psyche Williams-Forson in her book, “Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power”, enabling some to buy houses and establish new businesses.

Yet it’s the racist associations that have endured. “The Birth of a Nation”, an overtly racist film released in 1915, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and depicts African-Americans as lazy and lecherous. Among other things, it shows an African-American legislator lounging with his feet on his desk, eating fried chicken. Claire Schmidt, a scholar at Missouri Valley College, argues that persistent advertising and pop-culture images of black Americans voraciously eating fried chicken with their hands reinforced racist stereotypes about “dirt, manners, self-control and ignorance”. Even today some black people are reluctant to eat fried chicken in public.

The idea that there is some special connection between black people and chicken has proved stubbornly persistent. During one of his routines Dave Chappelle, a black American comedian, recounts a waiter at a restaurant in Mississippi suggesting that he order the chicken since “It is no secret down here that blacks and chickens are quite fond of one another.”

As a result of the chicken’s testimony, the woman received 39 lashes

Despite that perceived relationship, or perhaps because of it, it was a white man, Harland Sanders, who capitalised on fried chicken in the form of the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) chain, which he made into a global business. In the 1930s, so the legend goes, Sanders took over a service station and began serving “weary travellers” the same fried chicken he had grown up eating. Pressure-frying the chicken allowed him rapidly to produce the stuff in vast quantities. Over time he honed his recipe and he franchised the first KFC in Salt Lake City in 1952.

Efforts by African-American-owned businesses to reclaim fried chicken have not been entirely successful. In the 1960s Mahalia Jackson, an American gospel singer, was the face of a national fried-chicken chain that hoped to challenge KFC. She marketed the products to black Americans but Minnie Pearl, a white comedian, sold the same chicken to white customers. In the end the colonel (an honorary title only) outgunned her, as he has most of his other competitors. There are now 25,000 KFC outlets in over 145 countries around the world. It would be hard to count his chickens. ■

Josie Delap is The Economist’s international editor and writes about food for 1843

ILLUSTRATIONS: MICHAEL GLENWOOD