Southern Fried Chicken

Fried chicken is the most famous dish in the African American culinary tradition, and its history is the history of that tradition: created by enslaved African cooks who combined West African deep-frying technique (frying in palm oil — the same tradition that produced *akara*, *dodo*, and *puff-puff*) with the Scottish-English seasoned-flour-coating technique brought by British colonists. The enslaved cooks who synthesised these two traditions produced something that belonged to neither source and that became, over 300 years, the most widely replicated American food on earth. Jessica B. Harris traces the frying technique to the Senegambian and Akan traditions; Michael Twitty places it in the context of the plantation kitchen where enslaved cooks prepared food for the slaveholder's table and, with whatever scraps and access they had, for their own. The dish was one of the few that enslaved people were permitted to sell — chickens were among the few animals they could raise on provision grounds — making fried chicken both a technique and an economic act.

Chicken pieces (bone-in, skin-on — the skin is the crust's anchor and the bone conducts heat to cook the interior evenly) marinated or brined, dredged in seasoned flour, and fried in fat at 160-170°C until the crust is deeply golden, audibly crisp, and the meat is cooked through to the bone with juices running clear. The crust should shatter at first bite. The interior should be juicy and seasoned throughout — not just at the surface. The smell of properly frying chicken — hot fat, pepper, garlic, the caramelising flour — is one of the most evocative in American cooking.

Hot sauce (always), white bread (for a fried chicken sandwich — the simplest, most satisfying version), coleslaw, potato salad, collard greens, mac and cheese, biscuits. Fried chicken is the centrepiece of the African American Sunday dinner, the church picnic, the family reunion, the Juneteenth celebration. Cold fried chicken — eaten the next day, straight from the refrigerator — is a different and arguably equal pleasure.