![]() ![]() It’s one of the most outrageous examples of cultural theft. The white folk took the credit for its creation, while black people were mocked and parodied merely as greedy consumers. And then, after emancipation, women known as “waiter carriers” would hawk trays of fried chicken and biscuits to travellers through open windows as their trains stopped in stations.īut while these black cooks and homemakers effectively invented what would become known as southern food, their contribution was erased. ![]() Black domestic workers would cook fried chicken for their masters and, later, their employers. Historically, chickens held special importance for enslaved black Americans, being the only livestock they were allowed to keep. It wasn’t the first time someone used a racist slur against me that went over my head, like the time someone called me a golliwog and I laughed along with them, too young to understand the inference. ![]() My colleague’s was a specific type of racism, a sort perpetuated by liberals so believing in their supposed lack of prejudice they think they can make racist jokes ironically. It infuriated me, but I could never articulate why. In my day job as a writer on a national newspaper – my supper clubs then were still a hobby – I sat next to someone who would often crack the same joke when I stood up to go for lunch. But it was seeping into my subconscious, and I felt it.Īs with most things, what happens in the US winds its way over to the UK. And, ultimately, it was Japanese, from the same nation of sushi and sashimi, of culinary refinement and gastronomic precision.īack then, I was not even conscious of the racist baggage fried chicken came with in the US. It contained ingredients I could source only in specialist shops. Karaage sat comfortably because I perceived in it a refinement I overlooked in its deep south counterpart. ‘I became hooked after my Japanese sister-in-law made it for me.’ Photograph: KPS/Getty Images/iStockphoto And while I loved it, I still preferred regular fried chicken. The club was held in my home, with all the furniture pushed back against the wall to make space for collapsible tables, and the menu changed constantly, but karaage was a permanent fixture. For months, I’d make it every weekend, and once I had run out of friends and family to feed it to, I started a supper club so strangers could pay me to make it. I became hooked after my Japanese sister-in-law made it for me. It was karaage, the Japanese iteration, made with boneless (I know) and skinless chicken thighs marinated in soy sauce, mirin, ginger and garlic. In the end, I, too, would make a living out of fried chicken, but not southern fried. But there was always something so far removed from the dish’s origins. That’s not to say the chicken was not good. There was almost always a boneless option, too, presumably catering to an audience for whom the skeleton is an unwelcome reminder that what they were eating was once alive. They boasted about the happy lives their chickens enjoyed, and how they honoured them with 24-hour buttermilk baths and shiny, homemade glazes. ![]() Shops serving “ethical” fried chicken started popping up all over the place, selling an experience marketed as superior to the neon-lit shops serving food in red-and-yellow cardboard boxes. I’d muse that if only someone opened a shop serving southern fried chicken, but using free-range birds, they would make a killing. The cheap chicken shops, fronted with happy cartoon chickens, were always concentrated in poorer areas, ones with a bigger black population. Only, by the time I made the move to London in 2000, with its countless chicken shops, I’d read about the inhumane conditions most birds destined for fast-food fryers were subjected to, so my trips to them were rare, often preceded by alcohol and always succeeded by guilt.Īlready, I was noticing a pattern. So, like mango juice, hardo bread and sugar cane, we made the most of it on our trips to the city.īack then, I’d promised myself that as soon as I was old enough, I’d eat fried chicken all the time. KFC wouldn’t make an appearance there until well after the millennium. Where we lived in Weymouth, Dorset, you couldn’t get it. Alongside curry goat and curry chicken, his mum would often make it, as would the other Jamaican aunties living nearby. I can still smell the sharpness of the lemon hand wipe that would clean me up afterwards.įried chicken had been a regular feature in Dad’s childhood home in Darlington, County Durham, where his family moved from Jamaica. Mum would nod, and soon enough I’d be savouring my two pieces of chicken – leg, if I was lucky. “Shall we?” Dad would ask, as if it were a question and not an inevitability. ![]()
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