Fried Chicken

History

Abby Fisher dictated this fried-chicken recipe for "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking," published in San Francisco in 1881. Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton, and could neither read nor write; she entrusted the dictation of her cookbook to friends. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. Her method is spare and direct: the jointed pieces are washed, seasoned with salt and pepper, rolled well in flour, and dropped into very hot fat until brown, with a thin flour-and-water gravy made in the same skillet afterward — no batter and no buttermilk soak, the Southern frying she had cooked and mastered, set down in her own words.

Her book is among the earliest cookbooks by an African American author and the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" (1866). Fisher earned her living as a pickle and preserves manufacturer in San Francisco and won two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880 and a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879.

The historical record does not document a single origin for Southern fried chicken, and the often-repeated claim that Scottish immigrants brought the technique of frying chicken in fat rests on no primary source — the writer who popularized it offered no proof for it, as food historian Adrian Miller has noted. What the record does support is that the dish draws on more than one culinary stream, including West African traditions of frying and seasoning, and that African-American women — enslaved and, later, free — were central to it: they were noted sellers of poultry, live or cooked, as early as the 1730s, giving fried chicken deep and documented roots in the African-American communities of the South. Fisher's 1881 recipe stands within that history as one Black Southern cook's own authoritative record of the food.

Ingredients

• 1 chicken
• salt
• pepper
• flour
• fat
• 1 tablespoon flour
• water

Instructions

1. Cut the chicken into pieces, separating every joint, and wash clean.
2. Salt and pepper the pieces, then roll them thoroughly in flour.
3. Heat your fat until very hot.
4. Drop the floured chicken pieces into the hot fat.
5. Cook until the pieces brown, testing doneness by inserting a fork—the chicken is done when the fork passes easily into the meat.
6. Once all the chicken is cooked, leave a little of the hot fat in the skillet.
7. Add a tablespoonful of dry flour to the fat, stirring it around to brown.
8. Pour in water and stir until the gravy is as thin as soup.