Fried Southern Food

What’s up with Southern food? Why is so much stuff fried? Where did that come from? As a Southerner and a history aficionado, I used to wonder about that, too, so I did some research. Since practically all Southerners love fried chicken, and since fried chicken is probably the most popular Southern food of all, that’s what my efforts focused on.

You might not know this, but a lot of Southern cooking and Southern recipes weren’t really “Southern” to begin with. They were actually Western – West African, that is. Southerners in the Deep South decided they wanted to grow rice on their big plantations. The coastlines and Sea Islands along Georgia and South Carolina were well suited for rice growing. The problem was that the plantation owners didn’t know much about growing rice. They needed slaves to work the fields, so they decided to get slaves from rice-growing areas in Africa. These individuals were very knowledgeable about growing, harvesting, and using rice. You know how this turned out. The slaves were captured, brought to the United States, and sold in markets in Charleston and Savannah.

The black slaves had been raising chickens for generations in their homeland, and one way it was often prepared was by frying the chicken parts in hot oil. Naturally, this practice followed them to America. But how did it spread? Many of the slaves became cooks in the plantation houses, and evidently, they were sometimes allowed to decide the food that would be cooked. When they cooked and served fried chicken, the whites fell in love with it and told their neighbors about it.

Back then, chicken was fried in hog lard. Even today, many southern cooks still use lard for frying chicken. Some restaurants do, too. Basic fried chicken includes dredging and seasoning the chicken before frying it in hot oil. Some cooks marinate the chicken first, while others don’t. Seasonings vary, too. Some cooks soak or dip the chicken pieces in buttermilk before dredging in flour in order for more flour to stick.

Tags: fried chicken, history of fried chicken, slave food, southern food, southern food history, southern recipes

Category: Interior decor