Killing The Chicken Southern Style

The time was early 1940’s. College Park, Georgia just outside of Atlanta.
I was six or seven years old, staying with my “Nanny,” my mothers mother. My grandmother. She must have been in her early eighties, small and frail, slightly stooped. Her hair was snow white, she wore gold wire spectacles.
“Poppie,” my grandfather, and Nanny lived in a huge Victorian house next to the railroad tracks, I used to wave to the steam engines. The house had been divided into apartments, and the they had the left side downstairs of the house, with a front and back porch.
Nanny made the best southern fried chicken in the world. I think the secret was the actual chicken.
In the afternoon before dinner, she called it supper, my grandmother would take my hand and we would walk about a city block to buy a chicken.
This was not a neighborhood grocery, but a small white frame building with an open front, dirt floor and a shed forming the entrance. The little building was stacked to the roof with small cages. Each cage contained a live chicken with white feathers. They were not fat birds but small, slim and graceful.
They were called “fryers” and would feed three people if they were not too hungry.
Behind the counter a man in a bloody apron asked Nanny to choose her chicken. I didn’t know her requirements, but she knew exactly which one she wanted, and she did not want him to kill and dress it.
The man reached into the cage, grabbed the chicken and tied its legs together with string, handed the bird to Nanny and received a hand full of change in return.
We walked back to the house with the live chicken swinging from Nanny’s hand.
Taking the chicken to the kitchen, Nanny picked up a large butcher knife and proceeded out the door to the back porch.
She was not a cruel person.
Taking the knife, she doubled the birds neck over the sharp blade and with a sawing motion cut the chicken’s head off.
Tossing the head aside, she cut the string binding the chicken’s legs and threw the bird into the yard. The chicken ran around the back of the house, blood spurting from its headless neck. After a few frantic minutes, it lay still.
Nanny retrieved the bird and took it back to the kitchen.
She put a large pot of water on the stove and turned the flame all the way up. When it came to a boil, she took the chicken by the legs and dunked it into the scalding water for a few seconds.
Taking the bird from the water she let it cool. With small strong fingers and quick movements she proceeded to pull the feathers from the still steaming body, down to what she called the pin feathers.
Again taking the butcher knife she began to cut the chicken up into pieces, saving the heart and liver and throwing the rest of the insides away. Washed, the pieces were small; two breasts, two thighs, two drumsticks, two wings and my favorite, which I can not find in any supermarket, she called the pullybone.
Putting the pieces into a bowl of buttermilk to soak, she put the bowl into her icebox for a couple of hours.
Nanny would drain the chicken pieces, putting them on a Piece of Cut-rite waxed paper, she would salt, pepper and flour them. Taking a heavy twelve inch iron skillet, she would fill it with a combination of bacon grease and lard (now considered bad for you, I use peanut oil) and on the old gas stove bringing it to the point of frying. She would test the hotness of the grease by flicking a drop of water into the pan.
Lowering the flame slightly she would put the chicken pieces into the hot fat. Cooking them quickly to make them crispy, she would take them out, holding them over the skillet to drain and put them on a plate covered with a linen towel.
She would serve the chicken, not hot, but at room temperature. She thought it was better that way.
I have been trying to make fried chicken that tasted like Nanny’s all of my life. I go to the supermarket and buy what they call “chicken, cutup country style” resting and soaking in its own juices with a diaper on the bottom of the plastic package to contain any excess liquid.
Stamped with the date of expiration, you don’t know the history of this bird. There is no pullybone in this package and the breasts look as if they came off of a turkey, “lots of white meat.”
Even following Nanny’s recipe there is no way to get these pieces crispy, they’re way too big and infused with water to add weight. The only thing I get out of this ritual is the memory of Nanny’s crispy southern fried chicken.
Yumm, Yumm.
See, the secret is the chicken that no longer exists.

Pale memories of growing up in the south...or when black was colored and white was white.


©2004 Tony Anthony