Why
We Can't Get Enough Fried Chicken
By Josh Anderson
With
so many delicious variations, it's a dish we can all agree
on HAD YOU PLACED a bet a decade or two ago on what would
be the "It" dish of 2013, would you have put
your money on fried chicken? Old-fashioned, hard to eat,
messy to cook, downmarket and déclassé,
it once seemed to belong to the South-and not in a good
way. Yet now, against all odds, this old-school classic
is trending feverishly.
Fried
chicken, like America itself, looks different than it
once did. Rock-star chefs in hipster enclaves have foodies
in a tizzy over weekly fried chicken nights. Boldface-name
fine-dining chefs are giving the dish the kind of painstaking
attention formerly reserved for turbot and Wagyu beef.
The modernists, too, have gotten their tweezers on it,
crafting diabolically clever new versions undreamed-of
in Dixie. Regional takes on fried chicken, formerly known
only to a few lucky gluttons, are broadcast far and wide
on Instagram. And most radical of all, Korean immigrants
have brought their own version of the dish to this country-one
so spicy, crisp and addictive it threatens to snatch away
the South's golden-brown crown. "Fried chicken is
a rural dish from our past that has become even more beloved
in the modern moment," said John T. Edge, director
of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of
Mississippi and the dish's leading scholar. "It's
a primal food, eaten with your hands, with a bone at its
core. It's something we can all connect with, whether
we're from the South or not."
by
Josh Anderson for The Wall Street Journal
NASHVILLE HOT| Nashville-style hot chicken at Prince's
Hot Chicken Shack
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