Fried Chicken Is Common Ground

Before he started cooking hot chicken in Australia, before he opened his seventh location of Belles Hot Chicken and began planning for expansion in Asia, before he was serving customers like Chance the Rapper and American football star Marshawn Lynch, Morgan McGlone was sitting on a porch in Nashville.

- Osayi Endolyn

McGlone and friends were eating hot chicken, cooling their lips with glasses of natural wine, when he thought, this is how I should make my living. After an itinerant decade of cooking around the world and three years learning from American chef Sean Brock, McGlone was struck with the idea of bringing Nashville’s most famous dish together with his love for wild-fermented wines and selling it to the audience he knew best: Australians.

But, of course, long before McGlone thought to make money from American-style fried chicken, there were many, many others.

For at least 150 years, people have been cooking and selling fried chicken in America. The earliest were black women, newly freed from slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. These entrepreneurial cooks, known as “waiter carriers”, brought their skills and their chicken to markets and train stations to sell to travellers passing through towns like Gordonsville, Virginia. They sold chicken to support themselves and their families, because that was the work that was available to them.

Though their culinary contributions went uncredited for centuries, African and African American cooks were largely responsible for creating what Americans now know as Southern food. From the mid-18th century through Emancipation, dishes like fried chicken were developed and prepared by enslaved cooks, who combined West African culinary traditions with those of indigenous North American peoples and European colonialists.

In the early 19th century, white members of high society like Mary Randolph, a distant relative to Thomas Jefferson, wrote cookbooks that commandeered the recipes of black cooks. The books were a revelation to white audiences at the time and helped launch dishes like fried chicken to widespread popularity. Meanwhile, notes writer Adrian Miller in his book