New York in a Dozen Dishes by Sietsema Robert

Author:Sietsema, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Cooking / Essays and Narratives
ISBN: 9780544453630
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

Where Fried Chicken Originated

Since 1980 or so, I’ve been pondering the convoluted international route by which fried chicken made it to United States, and how it gradually became ubiquitous on New York menus. Even now, after three decades of fried chicken vilification for its supposed unhealthiness, the website MenuPages lists 3,587 restaurants that serve it in various guises—not all of it the soul food article, of course. In fact, fried chicken deserves to be counted among the city’s most popular dishes in perpetuity. By contrast, MenuPages lists only 1,767 places (out of a total of twenty thousand or so total restaurants listed for New York) that serve hamburgers. Hamburgers!

As the widely accepted story goes, the dish originated with African cooks who, as enslaved persons, worked in plantation kitchens down South. As with other recipes such as fried okra, roasted yams, black-eyed peas, grits, and stewed collard greens, fried chicken is said to have originated in Africa. The West African antecedents of these other dishes are quite clear, since the raw materials are native to or were available in West Africa during the 17th and 18th centuries. But what about fried chicken?

Indeed, on a trip I took to West Africa in 1979–1980, I kept careful track of the food I ate in Senegal, Mali, Benin, and Burkina Faso (then known as Upper Volta). In those days, as far as chicken went, you had two choices: you could buy it, feathers and all, in the local outdoor market, or you could find it already grilled over scraps of wood in open pits by the side of the road. At the time these chickens cost two dollars apiece, limiting their purchase to the wealthy. Each of the four countries also had its own chicken specialties (for example, Senegal’s poulet yassa, chicken stewed in mustard and onions), but none involved breading the bird and frying it. Africans tend to cook chicken and game birds (and bats, for that matter) in stews that can accompany rice or fufu—tubers or plantains mashed to a bouncy constituency—starches that form the largest part of the meal.

In fact, I never ate or even saw fried chicken in two visits to West Africa, the second of which occurred in 1984. As a dish that supposedly originated there—according to legend, at least—it had executed something of a disappearance. A decade later I was to find myself visiting and reviewing dozens of West African restaurants in all of New York’s five boroughs, mainly Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese, Ivorian, Guinean, Sierra Leonean, and Liberian places. These modest establishments, usually just a single small room with African paintings, masks, and wooden carvings on the walls, filled with the rich smells of palm oil, dried stockfish, and peanut soup, invariably offered fried chicken.

But that didn’t necessarily mean that the dish had been familiar back home. As I was to find out, putting it on the menu functioned in two distinct ways. First, to lure the already resident African-Americans who lived in the neighborhoods the new West

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