Fried chicken!

By TED ROBERTS, the SCRIBBLER ON THE ROOF

All went well in my young, southern life until my boss recited a suspicious speech to me about the beauties of Boston. As a gentle postscript to his tirade, he underlined that my bi-weekly paycheck wouldn’t continue unless I relocated to this New England location a few miles south of Siberia.

Well, I responded with all the alacrity of any full-blooded southerner who loved Memphis, Tennessee, but fed his family with a bi-weekly paycheck. Sure. We went to Boston.

He was right – it was a culinary and cultural paradise (if you could live through twelve-inch snowfalls and winter winds that threatened sensitive and essential parts of the body). Beside the glacial weather, we acclimated nicely. Even shoveling that foot of snow out of the driveway every morning was easy for my daughter – I figured I was saving her health club dues and also teaching her the rigors of life like the good father I was.

Then one night around suppertime the snake showed his face in Eden. I suggested a conservation of my wife’s energy (with a burst of generosity) – “Let’s eat out,” I announced. Lobster and clams and oysters are nice, but my inner self expressing itself through my taste buds were screaming for the southern fried chicken on which I was raised. After all, we were in the Athens of America. Culinary Science, as well as MIT electronic genus, must flourish here.

So, we piled in the car (the daughter had done her assigned task of clearing the drive an hour before) so it only took us twenty minutes or so to mush through the driveway. Once we hit the street we zoomed to a typical, classic Boston restaurant that featured a red, neon sign. “Fried Chicken” it hollered. Well, you should stop reading here. It was inedible. I suspect the kitchen was staffed by Union Civil War descendants still raging with Confederate hate and paid to sabotage the Southern belly.

First of all, the use of skillets was obviously banned. They had baked the battered chicken! That’s equivalent to pot boiling a steak or frying oysters in their shell or catsuping Pate De Foie Gras. We left in a hurry; one hand over our mouths, the other massaging our persecuted stomach. All future fried chicken dinners were cooked at home. It was the end of our gustatory nightlife.

This nightmare was revived in my memory when an old Boston friend called the other night to triumphantly tell me that he had paid an ex-CIA agent to not only look into the Iranian nuke progress, but also the secrets of Southern fried chicken. When I promised I wouldn’t use his name and additionally agreed to Fed Ex him two perfectly fried drumsticks, he confessed his secrets: Boil the chicken first, keep the top on the skillet, fry it in olive oil – a recipe for disaster if not colon cancer. His “agent” must have been a double agent whose ancestors wore gray at Gettysburg. I’m skipping other details that would put you on a non-chicken diet.

I gently, softly, but persuasively explained that if he persisted in this behavior, he’d kill the diner as well as the chicken. And being an open-minded seeker of fried chicken cookery, he thanked me. I hung up and looked out the window to make sure I was now in Huntsville where the natives and eateries have mastered this culinary art. Since I’m not on commission, I’ll withhold their names – you know who they are. Think I’ll have it for supper tonight.

My mama was an artiste when it came to battered, skillet-born chicken. But as a child – therefore junior member of the family – in that benighted age I dined on necks and gizzards. Breasts and drumsticks were for mamas and papas. But I eventually graduated. Who could forget their first drumstick? It ranked well with other measures of maturation.