Who doesn't love fried chicken? Done right, it is so good. If you are going to eat fried foods, go for the glory and eat that crunchy skin and moist meat. Yum.
My Tennessee-born Nana made her fried chicken in the most seasoned cast iron skillet. It had seen decades of bacon fat, lard and Crisco. It was so old, it had no handle. My Nana's hands, creased and liver-spotted after years of working on her 10-acre avocado grove, could whip up a batch of chicken in no time. If the fat spattered, no matter. Before celebrity chefs coined the phrase "Teflon hands" she had cooking burns, blackberry bush scratches and dog bites. This was a woman who was widowed in her mid 40s, never married again and continued to work her farm. She was barely five feet tall, a trained nurse and mid wife, delivering babies and caring for the dying most of her adult life.
But back to that chicken. She used a ton of fresh black pepper in her dredge and used fat she had poured off into an old coffee can from the remnants of frying bacon. Before a supermarket moved into her farmland neighborhood, she'd go out in the backyard chicken coup, wring a good looking fryer's neck, pluck it and we'd have chicken on the table in no time.
For some strange reason, the debates about Chik-Fil-A have reminded me of my little Nana. I tend to agree with most folks that fried foods and arguing about gay marriage give me indigestion. But what would she have thought? Would she really care about two people wanting to marry, regardless of gender? The Queen of Fried Chicken, I would imagine, would be confounded for a bit, and would gnaw on her favorite part, the wish bone, and think. She would think back over her life. Delivering those black babies no doctor wanted to. Going to the "poor" part of town and nursing the "colored" sick folk that couldn't afford a doctor or hospital. Or maybe she'd think about her son, a decorated Korean War veteran, father of two, who decided an openly gay lifestyle in the 1960s and living with two men was alright with him.
"To each his own," she'd say. "It don't bother me none. Now pass me some more chicken."
