Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
link Karl Terry
Local columnist
If I told you that growing up I ate a lot of fried chicken that would probably be an understatement. We actually ate a whole lot of fried chicken.
Our noon meal on the farm was called dinner and we had fried chicken at dinner probably three times a week and sometimes we had it at supper.
This was back before the days of the chain chicken places and my mother fixed it right in her own kitchen. Not too many people would tackle pan-frying chicken these days, let alone stop working in the field and do it at noon.
I guess you could have had the butcher cut your chicken up but it probably cost a little more and we ate a lot of chicken because we were on a tight budget so mom did it herself. She was pretty good at it, too.
Back then a fryer chicken of about 4 pounds cost about 39-cents a pound. Now that’s a pretty cheap meal.
When she got through she had 10 good pieces and a back. There were two legs, two thighs, two wings, two breast halves, a pulley bone and a piece we called the plow — a convenient number for a family of five.
She floured the chicken up in a biscuit tin and then fried it golden brown in Crisco shortening in a heavy black cast iron skillet.
With 11 pieces and five people our family could relate to the Jerry Clower story about “The Last Piece of Chicken,” where the countrified comedian told the story of Uncle Versi Ledbetter’s family and an unfortunate incident.
It seems that Clower checked in on the Ledbetter clan just as supper was finishing up and the whole family was sitting around the table with one piece of chicken left on the platter in the middle of the table.
The Ledbetter bunch had been raised right and knew that you didn’t take the last piece of chicken or the last biscuit off the plate, even if you wanted it “some kinda bad.” About that time a gust of wind blew the lantern out, though, and you could hear Uncle Versi squall. When Aunt Pet finally got the lantern lit again there were five forks sticking in the back of Uncle Versi’s hand.
We also had homemade biscuits with our chicken or, as Clower described them, “cat-head squeezed.”
Mom worked the dough between her thumb and forefinger and pinched off just the right amount of dough for a biscuit. As she squeezed them out they looked like little cat heads.
Clower also described the evil-tasting canned biscuits as whomp-em biscuits because the directions called for whomping the can on the counter to get them open. If Mom used canned biscuits, which she frequently did as we got older, we kidded her about the whomp-em biscuits.
Once, after years of fast food chicken then watching our cholesterol and finally going without chicken, we talked mom into actually frying chicken, something she hadn’t done for all of us in years.
She might not have had her cast iron skillet but she certainly hadn’t lost her talent for frying chicken.
Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]