Why
We Can't Get Enough Fried Chicken
By
FBWorld Team
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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