Fried Chicken by John T. Edge

grease for any cracklin’s that might burn and render his oil acrid.
    He drops the nuggets of fused chicken fat into an oversized tin can, which a second team of runners will eventually empty for use in the gravy. I watch his progress, waiting for the moment when the cracklin’s have cooled enough to palm. By this time, I have commandeered the makings of a fine midday snack: a paper plate heaped with dressing, a brace of deep-fried gizzards, and an ice-cold Old Style beer snagged from a fellow fryer’s cooler.
    In the distance, I can hear the trill of a toy train whistle, the clack of the betting wheel, the splinter-voiced call of teenage boys hawking raffle tickets for baby blankets and twenty-five-dollar savings bonds. I settle into a squat alongside Jim’s fryer and scoop a ragged hunk of dressing from my plate, which now rests on a patch of grease-soaked ground. Jim pulls another load from the fryer and asks me to mind his gear while he takes a bathroom break. I nod, and in so doing, take my first, tentative step from interloper to acolyte in the brotherhood of fry cooks.
    Fried Chicken Cooked in the Great Out-of-Doors
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    no recipe follows this chapter because, in large part, the secret to St. Paul’s fried chicken has less to do with recipe and technique and more to do with where the chicken is cooked: out of doors.
    Though you can buy a ready-made kit of the type marketed for crawfish boils and turkey fries, I recommend a homegrown rig much like the one Jim Sublett uses: a propane-fueled fryer set within a cast-iron sleeve. Mine is of sufficient circumference that when I heft up my cast-iron washpot (a flea-market prize) it cradles within quite snugly. Equipped with an oversized seine purchased at a restaurant supply house and four quarts of peanut oil, I’m ready to tackle any of these recipes that call for deep frying.
    And my wife appreciates the fact that the oil perfumes our backyard instead of our kitchen.
    Chicken Little
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    chicken wings came to the fore in the 1980s. Their arrival at corner taverns and national chain eateries compelled a reexamination of the anatomical composition of what zoologists know as Gallus domesticus.
    It was a transitional time in the evolution of chicken terminology. The popularity of wishbones—known more often in rural areas as pulleybones, dubbed merrythoughts in England—was on the wane (though the term had yet to be resigned to recognition as a brand of salad dressing or an offensive football formation). For the record, the wishbone is the forked structure in front of the chicken’s breastbone, formed by the fusion of the clavicles. According to widely embraced superstition, when two people tug at the ends of a wishbone, the person who retains the longer piece is granted a wish.
    But enough of the old lingo. Buffalo chicken wings demanded the dissemination of new terms: tips, flats, and drums. Soon we knew that the proper preparation of chicken wings called for the cook to snip off the tips and cut the remaining wings into meager-fleshed flats (comprising the ulna and radius) and drums (the meaty humerus). Even if we did not immediately warm to the new terminology, we learned that a flat didn’t taste fine unless you fried it to a crisp, lavished it with hot sauce, and dragged it through a cup of blue cheese dressing.

TWELVE

    On the Wings of Mother Teressa
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    buffalo, New York, is a drinking man’s town. And, despite what detractors will tell you about the year-round threat of blizzards at this outpost on the Canadian border, ice-cold beer seems to be the preferred drink of most Buffalo men. In preparation for my summer sojourn there, I read a number of texts, including Dale Anderson and Bob Riley’s opus A Beer Drinker’s Guide to Buffalo Bars; Verlyn Klinkenborg’s homage to his father-in-law’s Buffalo tavern, The Last Fine Time; and, more to the point, Calvin