ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

by Lolis Eric Elie Heart & Seoul

For years the gold standard of fried chicken for me was my Auntie Pat’s version. I was young then, barely a teenager. Still, I had ambitions of kitchen mastery and asked my aunt her secret. She rattled off the usual ingredients — chicken, flour, salt, pepper, oil. Then she said something that surprised me: She put butter in the frying oil. “I started off really young cooking,” she told me. “I don’t know where I went wrong, but that chicken that particular time just didn’t brown. So I called an older person and said, ‘I can’t get my chicken to brown.’ “She said, ‘Add butter to your grease and make sure your grease is hot when you add it.’” I am familiar with the miraculous browning properties of butter, but I am also familiar with butter’s low smoke point. If you want flavor, yes, add butter. But you can’t

fry with butter in the same way you would fry with vegetable oil. Or can you? “As soon as the grease is hot, you put the butter in. About a half a stick,” my aunt told me. “It will not burn, but you can’t keep using that grease time after time. “I would not recommend that to anybody today unless it was a one-time meal, because I realize how unhealthy that was. But delicious? Yes,” my aunt said, reflecting the wisdom that comes with advancing age and increasing awareness of Surgeon General warnings. “That was the only way I knew how to cook. You had to make sure it tasted good.” Chicken, flour, salt, pepper, oil and butter. Those are the only ingredients. Still, try as I might, I could never get my chicken to taste like my aunt’s. These days, I seldom fry chicken at home. I don’t like the fact that the smell of chicken

grease can sometimes linger in the air days after the bird has been consumed. For years, Leah Chase and Willie Mae Seaton fried my chickens for me, and my relationships with those women and their fried chicken were mutually profitable. Then, when I was working on HBO’s show Treme , Nina Noble, one of the show’s executive producers, came up the idea of creating a Treme cookbook that would incorporate the dishes that our characters were seen eating and cooking on screen. At one point in the show the chef character, Janette DeSautel, goes to New York and does her version of fried chicken. According to her backstory, Janette was born in Alabama and thus was well-versed in the tradition of Southern fried chicken. But moving to New York and working for David Chang, a Virginia-born chef of Korean extraction, she was moved to tap

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JULY•AUGUST 2019