JI vividly remember the first time I bit into a piece of fried chicken. It was at the beginning of the 2000s, I was still a teenager and the American fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), which was then developing all over France, had just opened a franchise in the small town of province in which I lived. The restaurant – a large gray concrete cube flanked by the brand’s red, white and black logo – had been planted in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of an industrial zone.
The bus dropped me off at one of those anonymous stops on the edge of the ring road, and with a certain determination I walked the two kilometers that separated me from the restaurant, while firmly clutching this promotional coupon that I had taken care to cut out of the local newspaper a few hours earlier. “5 Hot Wings bought = 5 offered”: the game is surely worth the candle, I said to myself, still wondering what had pushed me to deploy so much effort just to go and taste ten pieces of poultry soaked in oil. Maybe it was the lure of novelty? The suggestive power of a well-conducted marketing operation?
Looking back, I now know that I was looking for something else. I wanted to eat at KFC like I was going to see a blockbuster at the cinema, like I was wearing a pair of Nike sneakers or like I was displaying a poster of Michael Jordan in my room: to give myself a dose of Yankee exoticism , a little slice of the American way of life.
Guilty comfort
Once there, I finally got my hands on the Hot Wings. In this case, a cardboard box stained with grease stains, in which rested an assortment of drumsticks and chicken wings. Which had, beforehand, been seasoned with a mixture of herbs and spices, then coated with a thick layer of breadcrumbs before being briefly cooked, immersed entirely in a frying bath. An unpleasant smell of grease instantly took hold of my nostrils; it stuck to my fingers, it embedded itself in my clothes. But strangely, that day, I took a certain pleasure in feeling my mouth invade with grease, in feeling the skin crunch under my teeth and in sucking the wings to the bone. In this unsavory dish of junk food, I found a form of guilty comfort, the taste of which would now live on in me like a striking taste memory.
More than fifteen years later, I met a different kind of fried chicken, lighter, tastier – and above all, more authentic. I was writing an article for “M Le magazine du Monde” on the origins of soul food and I went to meet the few rare Parisian restaurateurs who claimed it. Alongside the mac and cheese (macaroni and cheese), corn bread (corn bread) or black eyed peas (cornile beans), one of the star dishes of this “soul food” from the southern United States, which constitutes the culinary heritage of African-Americans, is fried chicken.
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