_My friend, Herb, says a mystery haunts the kitchens of America. “Why can’t they properly fry chicken,” says Herb, “north of Lexington, Kentucky?”

Herb’s an ex-animal activist, poultry division. He got thrown out of his local chapter when he brought a brown bag of fried chicken to the Tuesday night meeting. Since then he’s backslid all the way to boiled chicken—eaten cold. So Herb knows chicken. He claims that north of Kentucky only immigrant Southern cooks, or their first generation descendents, know that the real thing comes from a skillet full of grease.

In my youth—contemporary with two-for-a-quarter barbecue sandwiches— skillet fried chicken was more than a meal. It was a harbinger of Spring. The voice of the chicken—so to speak— instead of the turtle dove was heard through the land. Soon there’d be green beans, and okra, and squash. Followed by watermelon for dessert. And baseball games down at the corner lot in the extravagance of late summer sunlight.

That’s what fried chicken meant in those days. In fact, the “fryer” was often called a “springer” by butchers and knowledgeable housewives. But modern genetics has dulled its seasonal appearance. Like oranges and roses, it’s available year round. You can walk into a Manhattan, New York Kentucky Fried Chicken in the middle of a February snowstorm and get yourself three pieces, a biscuit, mashed potatoes, and slaw. It’s passable, but it’s not the creation Mama set before you on a balmy May day in Memphis, Tennessee.

Even the chains, with their technical manuals and quality control procedures, can’t pull it off north of Lexington. Maybe you need high humidity or the scent of magnolia or a cotton field somewhere close to the city limits. Maybe it’s some intangible like the disposition of the cook. Whatever, it’s as rare up North as gardenia bushes.

I ought to know since I was there when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet opened in a Boston suburb. We counted down the days on a grease spattered calendar that hung on our kitchen wall next to the stove and told our Northern friends of the bliss to come.

Well, when the great day arrived and the whole family—two experienced gourmands and three eager young students marched into the newly opened fried chicken store. The employees greeted us with dazzling white porcelain smiles. Naturally, I looked for traces of crust in the corners of those smiling mouths. If the stuff in the back room was worth its salt how could these hearty helpers resist a pinch of crusty skin?

There was no evidence of temptation. And we understood why when we got our 10-piece, biscuit and gravy order. It was okay. Like curry’s okay without garlic and onions—like an early period Gainsborough is okay before he learned about blue—like an eclipse is okay on a cloudy day. (The best part of the meal was the cleanup; just throw your plates into a wooden garbage can. Mama would have loved that.)

I suspected an oven, not a deep fry, as the womb of the KFC creature. (My mama used the oven as a pantry for shortening.) What is it about skillets that Northern cooks distrust? What is this tribal, prenatal yearning for ovens?

That night—as the folks next-door peeped at us from half drawn shades, we whipped up a batch of our own. It was midnight madness. Our Northern neighbors must have suspected we were practising some Southern cultish thing like hymn singing or polishing cars. The ceremony involved a dead, plucked chicken in small pieces and a big round, iron thing that we put on the stove.

Later, we invited the neighbors over for a demonstration. We took them into the kitchen and explained the significant role of the “skillet.” We even demonstrated the joyful bubbling grease as it lapped around the edges of the skillet. And we gave a short, but technical presentation on the metallurgy of cookware ending up with a strong preference for cast-iron skillets. Aluminum is nice—excellent for whacking a kid on his bottom without bruising—but not the best for crust. Teflon is sinful and unnecessary, since nothing ever stuck in two inches of grease.

But they knew about skillets. “We even got one,” bragged the next-door lady. She used it every morning to fry a breakfast egg. Her dainty fry pan was the infant daughter of the cast iron crucible that we used three meals a day for steaks, chops, chicken, hamburgers, spaghetti, French toast, and pinning down the storm shelter door in a tornado.

Whenever we had friends over, the menu was chicken and biscuits. In Boston it was a great deal. Our Boston guests ate 39 cents a pound chicken and fed us $3.95 a pound Maine lobster. The Boston folks were the most benighted about crust technology. Often they complimented the tenderness and moistness of our offering, then pealed off the crust as though it was some protective device that fended off the grease. “Just like the shell of the lobster,” me and the wife mused.

Nothing’s messier than a kitchen that’s been through a fried chicken dinner. I remember my chicken eating youth. No matter how carefully my mother poured flour into the grocery sack—for battering the chicken—the kitchen ended up a floury, snowy Christmas card scene. And Mama, with her powdered hair, was transformed into an English judge. The flour was one problem—but the grease was another. It ended up on the floor—or on the counter top where we drained the chicken. The drizzle of grease came about because the mama insisted you could only build that magnificent crust in an open skillet. “Before you fry chicken, hide the skillet tops,” was her battle cry.

I hated those skillets full of dark, used oil and sometimes there were two of them. But the neighborhood critters, who knew how the grease enriched their fur, loved them. When I emptied skillets into the backyard, there were cheerful barks and meows from the homeless dogs and cats who used our garden for bridal chambers.

Shortly after our marriage my wife and I moved to Iowa, then over the next twenty years to Washington state, Boston, California, and New Jersey. We ate around, as they say. Luckily, my wife had learned, at my mother’s knee, the art of making crusty batches of golden fried drumsticks and floury Christmas card kitchens. And everywhere we went we demonstrated to the natives the proper way of preparing skillet fried fowl. “Maybe those Southerners talk funny,” said our neighbors, “but they sure can fry chicken!”

Well, we spread the gospel with zeal for the fifteen or so years we lived away. We even made a few converts. In foreign territory they light up big old skillets full of bubbling oil. And their Friday nights are festive.