![]() Because few jobs were readily available or accessible to Black women at the time, many used their culinary talents to provide for their families after the Civil War. When a train arrived in the station to drop off passengers or pick them up, they were met by the smells wafting through the open train windows of fried chicken and other baked goods that Black women carried in baskets on their heads. Gordonsville is about 20 miles outside of Charlottesville, and with the advent of the Louisa Railroad in 1840, it became a major stop on two train lines. In March 1862, during the Civil War, the Army of Northern Virginia transformed the Exchange Hotel near the train stop into the Gordonsville Receiving Hospital, and during this time, the waiter carriers served thousands of soldiers who stopped through the town. ![]() Perhaps the most notable women who embodied this tenacity were the “waiter carriers” in Gordonsville, Virginia, who were the reason that the town was named the fried chicken capital of the world in 1869 by writer George W. What I am more concerned with is what Black people did with this food that we had been mocked with. As evidenced by the work that I’ve done and found, it was part of a tradition associated with Black women. “When that mechanism came to the South, it was over-perfected by Black women. “Africans were frying food before coming to America,” she says. Williams-Forson in her book Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs.Īlthough Williams-Forson published her book in 2006, she still believes not much has changed since the dish was first brought to the American South. … But, the trading and selling of these foods for commerce also provided relative autonomy, social power, and economic freedom,” writes Psyche A. “Food serves more than its intended function to nourish and to satiate. After the Civil War, they understood their freedom meant they could fully grasp some agency over their lives all while creating and sustaining economic freedom for themselves through their culinary talents. I’m more concerned with our resilience.”Įnslaved Black women were considered to be experts in preparing everything now thought to be Southern food, including fried chicken. “What I am more concerned with is what Black people did with this food that we had been mocked with. ![]() The recipe instructs the reader to cut the chicken “as for the fricassee, dredge them well with flour, sprinkle them with salt” before frying with lard until the pieces are “a light brown.” In almost 200 years, the recipe remains nearly unchanged. Its popularity grew, and in 1828, fried chicken was firmly immortalized in the third edition of the first American cookbook, The Virginia Housewife. In 1634, when Captain Thomas Young visited Jamestown, he noted, “We found tables furnished with pork, kids, chickens, turkeys, young geese, caponetts and such other fowls as the seas of the year afforded.” By the 1700s, fried chicken was a beloved dish of Virginia governor William Byrd, who wrote about it in his diary, which is the earliest written account in America. When Virginia was still a colony, chicken was already a regular staple on wealthy dining tables. But where did one of America’s most popular foods begin? And, perhaps more importantly, what is the legacy of the enslaved and later free Black women who perfected this intrinsically Southern food? Signs point to Virginia, where there are still Black women who cook traditional Southern food and see the importance of having fried chicken on their menus.
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