Fried Chicken (7 page)

Chez Haynes, an American fried chicken outpost in Paris, France, pours honey atop their birds. So does Julep, a tony Southern restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi, where cooks infuse the honey with rosemary. Greenwood's on Green Street in Roswell, an Atlanta suburb, dunks fried chicken in Georgia mountain honey and then pours on pepper vinegar.

During the 1960s, there was even a chain, Yogi Bear's Honey Fried Chicken. James Beard, the dean of American gastronomes, paid homage to their version of the dish in his seminal work,
American Cooking,
but he failed to make note of the chain's modest and oddly affecting slogan—a tip of the hat to Yogi—“Better Than Your Average Chicken.”

SEVEN

Cock-A-Doodle Don't

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

they were halcyon, those days before the first fast-food lawsuit was filed in 2002, before restaurant chains came to represent rapid and, by extension, vapid homogenization of our nation's food supply. Nowadays, nutritionists decry that purveyors of fast-food fried chicken and burgers and fries are nothing more than fat-and-cholesterol-delivery outlets. And plaintiffs' attorneys, who earned their chops battling Big Tobacco, have begun calling fast food's parent companies Big Food. Driving the byways of America in search of meaning, I tend to discount the fast-food medium as message. But what could be more real, more American? Way back when, fast food was novel, even hip.

The year was 1969. The place was Nashville, Tennessee. Kentucky Fried Chicken, which had gone public with the backing of a local businessman, would, in that one year, earn more than twelve million dollars for its investors. Newspapers were full of stories of secretaries who became overnight tycoons when they cashed in early stock investments. It had been five years since founder Harlan Sanders, who leveraged his roadside motel court and restaurant into a 600-unit chicken chain, sold his stake in the company—not to mention his technique of quick-frying chicken in a pressure-cooker and his secret recipe containing eleven herbs and spices.

He was now five years into a round-the-world promotional tour on behalf of the Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation. In exchange for a generous annual fee, the honorary Kentucky colonel was the white-haired, string-tied, public face of the corporation. A born showman, Sanders was keen on kissing babies, shaking hands, and spreading the gospel according to Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the core of the gospel was the promise of riches. Untold riches. And Nashville was giddy over future prospects.

In 1969, along with a group of investors, Minnie Pearl, the Grand Ole Opry comedian famous for her homespun humor, had secured commitments for a chain of fried chicken houses: 1,400 locations of Minnie Pearl's Fried Chicken. Interior designers used her trademark hat—the flower-bedecked one that famously trailed a $1.95 price tag—as inspiration for the chain's color palette.

Minnie was not alone in her attempt to ride the wave breached by Harlan Sanders. Eddy Arnold, known to fans as “the Tennessee Plowboy,” was selling franchise licenses for Eddy Arnold's Tennessee Fried Chicken. Even Little Jimmie Dickens, who rose to fame singing “Take an Old Cold Tater and Wait,” opened a restaurant.

The rapidly escalating number of Nashville-based fried chicken franchises captured the attention of parodists Homer and Jethro. They recorded a lament, “There Ain't a Chicken Safe in Tennessee.” Not to be outdone, Billy Edd Wheeler cut “Fried Chicken and a Country Tune.” Over a banjo backbeat he sang:

 

Some entrepreneurs looked beyond Nashville's Grand Ole Opry for inspiration. The same businessmen who backed Minnie Pearl devised a franchise plan built around gospel recording artist Mahalia Jackson. (Benjamin Hooks, Jr., who would go on to become the president of the NAACP, was hired as the front man.) When Aretha Franklin opened a namesake fried chicken chain, James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, answered with the Golden Platter. By the mid-1970s, Chicken George's was in business in Baltimore, pegging its name to the popularity of a character in Alex Haley's epic novel
Roots.
Even Mickey Mantle got in the act, overseeing a country cooking restaurant that advertised, “To get a better piece of chicken, you'd have to be a rooster.”

The great majority of these franchises, and many more besides, have come and gone. But none enjoyed such a meteoric rise and fall as Minnie Pearl's Fried Chicken. Investors watched their stock crest and then, in 1970, crash. Problems were of two sorts: The principals had unreasonable expectations of growth and income. And, of even greater importance, they did not know how to fry chicken. Harlan Sanders had spent more than thirty years refining his recipe, traveling the back roads of America in search of restauranteurs who might share his vision. But the principals in Minnie Pearl's were the precursors of today's corporate shysters, churning overvalued assets and siphoning off the cream.

Sanders was known for his bluntness. He once declared that the corporate types at Kentucky Fried Chicken headquarters had bastardized his beloved chicken until it tasted like “nothing more than a fried doughball wrapped around some chicken.” Evidently, he chose not to comment on Minnie Pearl's product.

for every crass attempt to cash in, though, there was an entrepreneur determined to pay homage to his or her forebears by building a roadside restaurant and illuminating it with suitable neon candlepower that the whole world might step back to take a gander. I choose to see something uniquely American, something charmingly vainglorious, in one man's willingness to stake fame and fortune upon his mother's special chicken seasoning.

As director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization that studies the traditional food cultures of my native region, I admit that I am a bit biased against the big chains that buy their popsicle chicken by the reefer and their flour by the silo. Yet I can appreciate a fried chicken chain at a liminal stage in its evolution, just after it opens its second or third location and just before the accountant tells the owner, in order to keep food costs in line, “You need to start substituting domestic ginger for the Jamaican stuff now in your spice mix.” And while you're at it, “Put away your childish notions of what makes for good marketing. No more dressing up like a drumstick and standing by the curb, clucking to the kids.”

There's a certain appeal to a small chain with outsized ambitions, fronted by a man or woman who is just this side of megalomania. In the 1983 movie
Stroker Ace,
a NASCAR champion aligns himself with fried chicken magnate Clyde Torkle. Stroker Ace's contract requires him to wear a chicken suit for commercials and publicity stunts. And soon he's wearing that very chicken suit while driving the banked ovals at more than a hundred miles an hour in a stock car emblazoned with the slogan, “Fastest Chicken in the South.”

I think I would have liked Clyde Torkle's fried chicken. I also bet I would have liked Chicken in the Rough, an Oklahoma-based chain that served its chicken “unjointed and without silverware,” nestled amidst a “rough” of shoestring potatoes. (The chain's cigar-smoking mascot was a rooster who held a driver in his webbed foot and always seemed to be losing his ball in the grassy rough of a golf course.)

And I admire the entrepreneurial pluck of Norma Young of Searcy, Arkansas. In 1971 she was chosen as a United States Poultry Ambassador and, in the discharge of those duties, toured seven European countries. I have an inkling that, despite the lack of a bone in her 1971 National Chicken Cooking Contest-winning Dipper's Nuggets, I would have liked those too. (The dish was a precursor to the Chicken McNugget, served with a choice of pineapple, dill, or royalty sauces.) In 1997, at the age of eighty-five, she sold Chicken Twisters, a new recipe concept, to KFC for a tidy sum of money. If Young decided to open a chicken chain, I would be at her door, money in hand.

But all the compelling tales of fried chicken entrepreneurs are not tales of yore. While on the road, I discovered Zeke's Smokehouse in the Los Angeles exurbs, where Mike Rosen mans the fryers. The place feels a little too slick, and the cutesy Labrador mascot looks a little too ready for prime time. But the battered and fried Chicken Littles—the drumstick-shaped half of the wing, known to the trade as drumettes—are good enough to merit a return trip.

During that return trip, Rosen owns up to his expansion plans. He also tells me that, while working at a Hollywood restaurant, he cadged the batter recipe from an English gent who was pining for a taste of his native fish and chips. Come to think of it, the fritterlike puffiness of his Chicken Littles does call to mind the product of a top-flight Long John Silver's franchise.

 

 

 

a while back, I searched a database of business names, hoping that, despite what everyone told me, I might find a lone Minnie Pearl's Fried Chicken that was still in business. I reasoned that I owed them a tasting and, failing that, I might locate one of the table tents the company used in the day, the ones blazoned with the slogan “Howdylicious!” Only one possibility, Minnie Pearl's Pies in Westwego, Louisiana, seemed even worth exploring, but the woman who answered the phone said, “I have nothing to do with
that
Minnie Pearl. For one thing, she's dead and I'm alive. For another, Minnie Pearl is my given name—that woman you're talking about, that wasn't her real name, that name was for the stage. And plus, I don't fry a thing here.”

It seems that the only memory of Minnie Pearl's fried food reign is kept alive by a smart-aleck restaurateur who batters and fries pearl onions and calls them—you guessed it—Minnie Pearls. I had a bit more luck when I tried the same search for her black analogue, Mahalia Jackson's Fried Chicken, for which I scored two hits. It seems that octogenarian E.W. Mayo of Nashville has been biding his time since the 1970s, waiting for the chance to revive the chain and take it nationwide. Though locals tend to prefer his fried pies to her fried chicken, I would not count Mayo out. “I've got big plans,” he told me recently, “and a mean recipe for fried chicken. We're on our way, I tell you, on our way.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

though New Orleans boasts one of the more refined and insular food cultures in the country, the city is not absent chains. All the burger boys have outposts here. But even they must do battle with local multi-units like Lee's Hamburgers and Bud's Broiler.