ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

Paper-Skin Fried Chicken with Spicy Syrup and Korean Ribs• recipes follow on page 63 • photo by Romney Caruso

into some Asian flavor for her reimagining of the fried yardbird of her youth. While Janette was on screen frying fictional chicken, I was working with Jacqueline Blanchard, a Paincourtville native and, at that time, a sous chef at Restaurant August, to create a recipe for this dish that would appear in the cookbook. Chef Jackie, as we call her, was overqualified to be working with me. But then, as now, she was generous with her time. Initially, she’d intended to be an athlete. But an early injury sidelined those ambitions. She does cook, though, with the intensity of a competitor. “I was mentored through school by the great Randolph Cheramie, a legend of Bayou Lafourche,” she wrote on the Treme blog around the time we were creating the recipe.

“He had a presence. He knew if you were going to make it within the first five minutes with you. I began to realize that, in order for me to be successful, I had to really immerse myself. School wasn’t going to teach me everything. “I was fascinated with haute cuisine, so when I graduated from Nicholls State after Hurricane Katrina, I moved straight to Napa Valley to take up a position with The French Laundry,” she said. “I felt like I was on another planet.” After working at French Laundry and Benu in California, Frasca in Colorado and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, she returned to her South Louisiana roots to cook on Tchoupitoulas Street at August. These days Chef Jackie is busy as co-owner of Coutelier NOLA, the Oak Street knife shop she founded with her partner, Brandt Cox. That shop has recently

opened a second location, Coutelier NASH, in Nashville. The inspiration for her take on fried chicken was her own discovery of Korean fried chicken during the time she lived in New York. That chicken had skin that was paper thin and cracklin’ crisp. But why would you go all the way to Korea to get fried chicken when you’d have to fly over a few thousand perfectly good American fried chicken places to get there? For Southerners, few dishes are more important and emblematic than fried chicken. In his version of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead (You Rascal You),” Louis Armstrong would have us believe that one of the worst things about death is the lack of fried chicken. “When you’re lyin’ down six feet deep, no more fried chicken will you eat. I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you

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