Directions: |
Directions:1. Light the stove before catching the chicken so it will be hot by the time you are ready to cook.
2. Cut the chicken into two legs, two thighs, two wings, the wishbone, the breast, the neck and two back pieces
3. Dredge the chicken in the flour and seasonings
4. Place chicken in hot pan and turning it frequently, cook until done. |
Personal
Notes: |
Personal
Notes: When I was about 12 years old my parents decided that their five children (Evelyn 13, Les 12, Ellsworth, 11, Leo, 9 and Charlie 4) were old enough to take of themselves and the farm. My Dad had been asked to be a policeman at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines and he and Mother rigged a canvas over the rack on our farm truck and they were going “camping” at the Fair. For a week and Evelyn and I were in charge. As I recall it, that first evening alone Evelyn said she was hungry for fried chicken and I volunteered to get the chicken.
Today people buy chicken from the grocery store. The chicken has been slaughtered, cleaned, cutup, and presented on little plastic trays. Preparation for cooking consists of removing the plastic. If you are willing to pay a little more you can buy “free range” chicken which, as I understand it, only means the chicken was allowed to run around outside the chicken coop. I guess we were ahead of our time. All of our chickens were free range.
We always had couple hundred Leghorn chickens on the farm, some for laying eggs, some (the roosters) for frying. I had made a chicken catcher—a long piece of No. 9 wire (a heavy gauge wire which was strong and stiff enough to hold its form over a 5-6 feet span.) No 9 wire was a very useful thing for Iowa farm boys and always available. It is so thick and stiff that you need a pair of pliers to bend into small shapes. I fashioned a hook at one end so that I could hook it over one leg of a chicken. I threw corn on the ground and when the chickens came to eat I chose the one I wanted, hooked its leg and picked it up by its feet. There was not a lot of ceremony as I chopped off its head and skinned it. Skinning a chicken was faster than plucking and we didn’t eat the skin anyway. Plucking chickens was a nuisance. You had to heat water to a boil, scald the chicken, pluck the large feathers and then singe the bird over the flame to take off the pinfeathers. We washed the chicken with cold water to bring the temperature down. We never cooked meat before it was cooled.
I dressed the chicken, cleaning out the innards and cut it up into pieces. By this time Evelyn had fired up the stove with corncobs and had the frying pan ready with a generous amount of lard. This was before Col Sanders so we combined only salt and pepper with flour and rolled each piece of chicken. The five Brue kids ate the chicken with a loaf of homemade bread and home churned butter. My Mother, Caroline baked enough bread to use a 50 lb bag of flour each week. The empty flour sacks were used for diapers (the hemmed sacks) or dish towels (the unhemmed ones.)
Our little adventure worked well enough that after that we fried a chicken whenever the mood struck us.
Les Brue Feb 2009
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This recipe for Old Fashioned Fried Chicken is from