However, West Africans didn't make fried chicken the same way many Southerners traditionally did. Some culinary experts linked such expertise to West Africa where, for several centuries prior to European contact, local populations ate chicken and deep fried their food.
Southerners made it a centrepiece of their regional cuisine and boasted that only African Americans, mostly enslaved, could make “authentic” fried chicken. What I found was quite surprising.įrom the 17th to 19th Centuries, conventional wisdom designated the American South as fried chicken’s native habitat. And to put Southern fried chicken in the proper culinary and cultural context, I studied cookbooks from cuisines around the world, looking at all the different ways that it’s made. For the sake of in-depth “research” on the subject, I ate at 150 restaurants located in 35 cities and 15 states across the country. In my book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, I wrote about the history of traditional African American cuisine rooted in the Southern US and dedicated an entire chapter to fried chicken. I, too, am a holy altar acolyte of the bird. Now, Americans down 99lb of chicken each year – far more than beef (57lb) or pork (53lb). In fact, according to the US’ National Chicken Council, the average American ate 28lb of chicken in 1960. It later transitioned to something that people ate for breakfast or dinner a couple of times a week, and these days, it’s become so widely available that people eat it whenever the mood strikes. Until World War Two, fried chicken in the US was considered a food for special occasions.
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