Happy 2024! I appreciate your reading Between the Layers! If you’ve said to yourself, I need to read more of Anne Byrn in 2024 and would like to receive her recipes each Tuesday, do I have a deal for you! This is a preview of today’s paid subscriber post. For those chicken cooking tips and the chicken in the skillet recipe, which is fabulous, become a paid subscriber today and take advantage of my New Year’s Special Offer. 10 Things I Know About Chicken - No. 266For the new year, some chicken rules plus the best (and simplest) chicken dinner
I WALKED NERVOUSLY INTO the managing editor’s office at The Atlanta Journal after I heard through the grapevine that the newspaper was in need of a food writer. Their previous writer had just quit, which was unusual, as this was a career you settled into and rarely left. Before her, was the much-loved Grace Hartley and before her, the legendary Henrietta (Mrs. S.R.) Dull who steered cooks in Atlanta and across the South through World War I, the Depression, and World War II. I made sure to take the elevator to the sixth floor, not the eighth, which was The Atlanta Constitution, the rival morning paper back when newspapers had rivals, competed for news, and the only thing reporters shared was the elevator. I met with the editor Jim Minter who smoked a pipe and put his feet up on the desk like those photos of LBJ, but for all that bravado, he reminded me of my father. I brought along newspaper clips in one large portfolio, and they varied from Nashville bank robberies and train wrecks to Elvis’s death. Come to think of it, I wrote a lot about death and learned how to call grieving families and ask them questions about their departed, all the while typing through their tears and turning bland funeral announcements into pretty nice tributes.
But my big break was that August Sunday night when I was the lone reporter, the intern, at my hometown’s afternoon newspaper, The Nashville Banner. When we got the news that Elvis had died in Memphis, I noticed how the city editor was looking past me, hoping a real reporter would walk into the newsroom to take the story. But it was just me. And my story on Elvis went 1A, which means page one at the very top. Minter was impressed. And then he asks the question: ‘’Can you fry chicken?’’ Which caught me off-guard. I wasn’t prepared for questions about my cooking skills because being shy of my 22nd birthday, I hadn’t even had my own kitchen in which to fry chicken. I won’t go down the path on how this dialogue would never happen today. I just naively hoped this job I was applying for was more about writing than cooking. Being so young, I’d learn the cooking part on the job, I convinced myself. And I really wanted this job and thought the idea of working for one of the largest newspapers in the South might be, for lack of better words, the bomb. So I said, yesssss to his question. Yes, I could fry chicken, I told myself. I had helped my mother fry chicken all my life by standing by the skillet drooling like a hungry dog or pinching off the crispy parts as it drained on paper towels. I’d seen her do it enough to know you rinsed the chicken and placed it in a bowl with salted ice water to drain out the blood. Then you dried it off and dredged it in flour and seasonings—plenty of black pepper!—in a paper grocery bag. You shook that bag until every single piece had a fluffy winter coat of flour. By then the oil was hot, the chicken seared, and you did the back and forth dance of turning the chicken with a fork and stepping back quickly so it didn’t pop and burn your arm. Yep, final answer. By observation, I could clearly fry chicken.
And thus I got the job, and my stint at the newspaper lasted 15 years. Over time I learned a lot about chicken, and even more than just frying it. I once went to Tokyo with the National Broiler Council and judged a chicken cooking contest there. Sadly, most of the contestants didn’t cook the chicken. No one had told them not to serve it raw like sushi to the judges. I’ve had my own brushes with raw chicken, mostly by hosting my first barbecues and inviting friends over, cloaking the chicken pieces in sweet bottled barbecue sauce, placing it on the grill, and thinking once the sauce was cooked, the chicken must be too. But chicken needs to be cooked through, and that goes without saying, so it didn’t make my list of 10 chicken rules that I share today. Cooking chicken well, as it turns out, takes practice. And that’s why practice makes perfect and something called the instant-read thermometer helps. For you, for a new year, I share my life-learned chicken rules—the 10 things I’ve learned on the job and in the kitchen about cooking the best chicken, and that roasted chicken recipe, too:... Subscribe to Anne Byrn: Between the Layers to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Anne Byrn: Between the Layers to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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