Who doesn’t love deep fried chicken? It’s literally in every meat-eating culture, an ubiquitous deliciousness spread around the world from the Indian subcontinent to the American deep south. If you eat meat, odds are you’ll love it. Here’s my attempt at a Haiku:

                                           Crispy, golden skin

                                           Juicy, sweet meat within

                                           The people’s delight

Silly right? But ever since starting this blog, I’ve been interested in who were the first people to deep fry chicken in animal fat. Now a quick google search will say that the Scottish immigrants were the first people to deep fry chicken. This is evidenced with a recipe in a 1747 cookbook my Hannah Glasse and additionally a diary entry dated to 1773 written on the Isle of Skye.

But there’s absolutely no way that white people created this dish first, I mean come on! They can get all the credit! But maybe this is just attributed to the first extant written records?? But even then I don’t believe it for a second. The whole entire world loves fried chicken, from Guatemala to Korea there’s no way that it’s origination started in the west.

Now what piques my interest is that the American style of fried chicken is linked to the slave’s expertise in making the dish, thus linking it inextricably to West Africa. There, centuries before the devastating trans-Atlantic slave trade West Africans were eating chicken and deep frying their foods. Unfortunately, most West African culinary traditions are not written down in books we do not have written excerpts. This is another example of history being white-washed and that the colonizing agents taking the credit of delicious food, but I digress.

The article linked about continues stating that the enslaved people of the American South learned how to cook fried chicken from their Scottish owners. And there’s something to be said for this because, in the States at least, the enslaved population was allowed to keep chickens. So, it may be entirely possible that the enslaved learned it and then make it their own. But I think the erasure of their own cuisines traditions in this narrative is suspect. As if the west Africans who were brought to the Americans only could figure out how to eat food by the grace of their captors is woe-fully ignorant and downright wrong. They are going to being with them their own cuisines and them make do with what was available to them in the west.

Additionally, in my own culture, we have an incredibly long history of fish fry. So to think that substituting one meat for another never occurred outside the lands of America is preposterous.

Enough about my ranting, (though there will probably be more) and stay tuned for delicious fried chicken talk, recipes, and more!