The Great Fried Chicken Debate of 1934

 

Now that I have your attention....

The Great Fried Chicken Debate

When you think of fried chicken, you probably think of Southern Fried Chicken or more famously Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But when the Great Fried Chicken Debate broke out in 1934, it didn’t start in the South but in, of all places, Chicago, occasioned by a cartoon in the Chicago Tribune.

On Sunday August 19, 1934 the Trib published a cartoon-story by its Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist John T. McCutcheon lamenting the fact that he couldn’t find authentic fried chicken in any Chicago eatery.

His story went like this:

Once there was a man from the corn belt who came to the city and made his fortune. After making it and before losing it, he decided to present a memorial to the city as a mark of his gratitude.

"The city doesn't need any more statues or libraries or museums or hospitals or asylums-it can scarcely support the ones it has. A city can never have too many fountains, but they, too, have to be kept up. But there is one thing this city lacks completely. I've searched the restaurants, the hotels, the clubs, the houses, and not one soul have I found who knows how to fry a spring chicken properly, à la old home cooking when I was a boy! Here they fry the juice all out and forget to leave the scrapings in the gravy - all the music and poetry that makes the real fried chicken the masterpiece of culinary is missing.

"My memorial shall be a recipe for fried chicken - if I can find one!"

After a long, fruitless search for a perfect fried chicken recipe, the man from the corn belt happened to befriend a lonely Hindu at A Century of Progress [another name for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair].

“I am most deeply grateful, sahib,” said the venerable Hindu, bowing low, “I wish to reward the spirit even more than the service itself. I am very old and I have absorbed all the wisdom of the mystics for thousands of years before me. I have the power to grant you any wish. I can arrange it so that you need never take more than one putt on a green; or that you will make a safe hit every time you go to bat; or I can make you irresistible to any lady of your choice, be she high or low. Speak! Shall I make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice?”

"O, no, thank you! I'm trying to keep my income tax down."

" Well then, perhaps there is something else you desire?"

“Yes,” said the man from the corn belt. "I have one great aspiration. I want the perfect recipe for fried chicken--one that will restore the lost art to countless millions who now see their hopes turn to ashes every time they order it. Grant me this wish and I will endeavor to make this city the fried chicken center of the world.”

Scarcely had he spoken the words when the venerable mystic drew from the folds of his robe a slip of rice paper which he rubbed softly in his hands, muttered a few strange words, and then handed to the wistful suppliant.

On the blank sheet of paper these memorable words slowly took form:

 ....

What followed was what McCutcheon considered to be the One True Way to make fried chicken. (See bottom of column for recipe)

Boy, did that ignite a firestorm of indignation and outrage. Readers from all over the country – the Trib was sold nationwide – wrote in, keeping the Letters columns spinning for the next month.

McCutcheon’s recipe wasn’t just wrong, it was Wrong, Wrong, WRONG!

One of the first letters came from Fannie Patz of 5746 South Park Avenue, Chicago:

TO: THE FRIED CHICKEN DEPARTMENT.

I read the recipe for country fried chicken in Mr. McCutcheon's Sunday cartoon. To my knowledge it is all wrong. Chicken fried by that recipe is not fried, but roasted, and will never taste like fried.

If you really want to eat real fried juicy chicken try my way. I have a reputation of knowing how to fry chicken the best that you or any one has ever tasted in any country or any city. You need not believe what I say. One can only prove things by eating it. I am from the south, am a private person. I do not run any restaurant or eating house, but know how to fry chicken. If you ever have an opportunity and chance to eat some you would always want to eat it and enjoy it.

I just had to laugh when I read this recipe. Putting in all that water would be juicy, but watery, and lose all taste.

Try my fried chicken. All you have to do is to let me know when you want it and where, and I shall be very glad to fry it for you, and if you will like it that is all I would wish. Then you could write my recipe. 

 

That drew a quick response from a restaurateur in the northern suburb of Libertyville, Illinois:

Even my milk-fed chickens, doomed to get it in the neck at an early date, cackled derisively at the criticism Fannie Patz hurled at Mr. McCutcheon's recipe for fried chicken.

I operate a restaurant, specializing in fried chicken dinners, and for four years I have cooked chicken à la McCutcheon. Many real connoisseurs of good food have informed me that neither in the south nor abroad have they tasted such delicious chicken.

With this in mind I cannot afford to let Fannie's claim to superiority go unchallenged, and I hereby invite her to meet me in a fried chicken contest. This could be staged, say at A Century of Progress, with the outcome to be decided by competent, impartial judges. What say, Fannie?

D. H, HOLMES.

 

And the letters kept coming, back and forth and back and forth, including a quick rejoinder from Mrs. Patz:

CHICKEN A LA PATZ

I read the letter in today's paper challenging me to a fried chicken contest. Well, Dear Editor, 1 would gladly accept the challenge, but do not want to spoil the other fellow’s business, as he is in the restaurant business and I am not. The following is my own recipe for fried chicken. I always received great praise for it from every one that ever ate same:

The chicken should weigh about three pounds. Dissect, wash thoroughly, drain but do not dry with a cloth. Season with pepper and salt, roll in flour. Use half butter and half of any other kind of fat, drippings preferred. Use a deep frying pan. Let fat get hot, but not smoking hot. Lay as many pieces in the bottom as it will hold. Do not crowd. Keep turning each piece until it is a golden brown. Cut in about three slices of onion. Let them brown with the chicken. When all chicken is brown, remove onions, put all ths chicken in a long roasting pan, pour the butter which you fried it in over chicken, cover and put it in a slow oven for three quarters of an hour, basting same occasionally during that time.

MRS. PATZ.

 

And on they came:

FRIED CHICKEN DEPARTMENT.

The fried chicken controversy has been interesting, but the most important point of all has thus far been entirely overlooked by the letter writers. There are various recipes, various methods of seasoning, and some people will prefer one and some another. But regardless of the recipe, one cannot fry chicken perfectly unless a skillet or pan is used which is thick and heavy enough to spread the heat evenly, allow for slow cooking, and prevent the meat from becoming dried out, tasteless, and stringy. For frying chicken you can't beat the old fashioned cast iron skillet that grandmother used. The deeper the skillet the better.

[Mrs.] MAE HEISE of Chicago.

 

Your cartoon in today's edition was a joy and an inspiration. Not that I care to know how you think fried chicken should be prepared, but at least and at last you have hit on a subject where you can offer a constructive suggestion. It sounds reasonable and certainly might inspire some good. The material that usually fills the space provided for a cartoon has never before, to my knowledge, in recent months, given any solution, suggestion, hope, inspiration, or recipe for anything either political or otherwise, and my sincere hope is that you will continue to give culinary recipes until you can conceive a constructive, useful, possible or feasible recipe for our emerging from the difficult plight in which our present day civilization finds itself due to the selfishness and nearsightedness of a small minority.

DISGUSTED in Chicago

 

Finally Mr. McCutcheon got the imprimatur of his recipe from none other than the most famous fried chicken man of Kentucky, national restaurant critic Duncan Hines, author of the guidebook “Adventures in Good Eating.” (This was five years before Harland Sanders of Corbin, Kentucky perfected his pressure cooking method of frying chicken in eleven herbs and spices. In fact at the time of McCutcheon’s original cartoon Sanders was running Sanders Court, which Hines praised in his 1935 guidebook for its country ham, no mention of fried chicken.)

In his companion cookbook “Adventures in Good Cooking,” Duncan Hines wrote:

Mr. John T. McCutcheon noted cartoonist agrees with me that there are mighty few public eating places where one may find Fried Chicken that is properly prepared and cooked. Seldom is it found to be thoroughly done yet tender and well-seasoned.

Some years ago Mr. McCutcheon prepared a cartoon on this subject which ran in the Chicago Tribune. It brought forth an enormous response from all over America. People in all sections of the country sent in their favorite fried chicken recipe but none has taken the place of the following which was given to Mr. McCutcheon by Mary Fletcher, the cook down on humorist George Ade’s Farm in Indiana.

 The Recipe At the End of John T. McCutcheon's Cartoon-Story:

So Dear Reader, after all that introductory material, here is the recipe that cartoonist McCutcheon claimed came from the Hindu mystic by way of Mary Fletcher at George Ade’s farm in northwestern Indiana:

 

Country Fried Chicken as Espoused by John T. McCutcheon and Endorsed by Duncan Hines

1 spring chicken (2 ¾ pounds) - Dress and Joint the chicken the day before it is to be fried. Put the joints into cold salt water for at least an hour and then put them on ice.

2 tablespoons flour - Before frying roll each piece lightly in flour and fry in one-third butter and 2/3 lard.

Add salt and pepper after the pieces are in the skillet. Fry slowly until brown. Then put all the pieces in a roaster and pour a little water over them also some butter. Cover the roaster and keep it in a slow oven (300 degrees F.) and steam for an hour to an hour and a half. Add a little more water if needed to keep the pieces from getting dry.

Add in a lightly browned but not too thin cream gravy all the scrapping from the skillet and roaster.

 

This May Be Col. Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken Recipe

Chicken is fried in every state but the state most identified with fried chicken is Kentucky (John Egerton and Ronni Lundy are both Kentucky natives). And you know why: Corbin, Kentucky gas station and diner owner Harland Sanders, who perfected his method of cooking it in 1939 and closely guarded his secrets, especially his special blend of eleven herbs and spices.

In 2016 the Chicago Tribune got a Fried Chicken recipe from Harland Sanders’ nephew Joe Ledington, supposedly the real Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe including the original “eleven herbs and spices.”

From a handwritten note Joe found in his Aunt Claudia Sanders’ photo album:

11 Spices – Mix With 2 Cups White Flour

1) 2/3 Ts Salt

2) 1/2 Ts Thyme

3) 1/2 Ts Basil

4) 1/3 Ts Origino (sic)

5) 1 Ts Celery Salt

6) 1 Ts Black Pepper

7) 1 Ts Dried Mustard

8) 4 Ts Paprika

9) 2 Ts Garlic Salt

10) 1 Ts Ground Ginger

11) 3 Ts White Pepper

Leddington said as important as the breading was the cooking method. "It was individually hand-breaded and dropped in those pressure cookers. You cooked it until it started turning brown. And then you put the lid on the pressure cooker and brought it to 12 pounds of pressure for 10 minutes. And then you started letting the pressure off, and when you uncapped it and the pressure was off, it was perfect: golden brown and fall-off-the-bone."

 

Colonel Sanders was, in real life, a cantankerous old cuss. The Kentucky Fried Chicken corporation, which bought his name, image, likeness, recipes and voice, paying him $200,000 a year for life, couldn’t buy his soul.

And when Kentucky Fried Chicken came out with a new version of his chicken, Extra Crispy, in 1973, he went on the road to promote it. Well, not exactly. He told Mimi Sheraton of the New York Times that it made him gag. And in an interview with Bob Carr of the Freeport, Illinois Journal Standard, he said, "If anybody ever catches me eating Extra Crispy, I hope they throw me out of the store. There's a place for some of it... I guess...maybe in the South, where they might like fried dough balls with chicken skin.”

Freeport, Illinois is two hours west of Chicago, where this whole Great Fried Chicken Debate originated. In 1934.