Apron Strings

Noelle entered this spine-tingling story to our Apron Strings con­test. You can enter yours too. Share your pain, we’ll pub­lish it here and give you a chance to buy good food and make prop­erly cooked food to serve your fam­ily. Thanks Noelle!

From a young age I dis­cov­ered a pro­found love for fried chicken. In fact, I was pretty sure some­one abducted me from the deep south­ern United States at birth, and unknow­ingly trans­planted me to an all-Italian fam­ily in Toronto. Instead of savour­ing clas­sic dishes like my beloved fried chicken, jalapeno-laced corn­bread and braised okra, I found myself seated at din­ner tables laden with pasta and veal Milanese.
So you can imag­ine my delight, when on a steamy August long week­end spent at a fam­ily friend’s Muskoka cot­tage, my mother proudly announced we would be hav­ing fried chicken for dinner.

What delight! What won­der! What crispy-skinned, salty-spicy, tender-juicy tid­bits awaited! I was only 12 years old at the time, and this meal was going to be epic.

My mother fol­lowed a 5-Star Food Network recipe to a tee. She care­fully soaked the chicken pieces overnight in flavoured but­ter­milk. She pat­ted them bone dry. She dou­ble breaded them in a home­made sea­soned flour mix­ture. She then took them out­side to a bub­bling deep fryer rest­ing pre­car­i­ously on a Coleman camp burner.

The chicken, and my mother, emerged from the fry­ing area unscathed. After tak­ing their sweet, golden bath, the pieces of meat emerged siz­zling in a per­fect shade — a heav­enly shade unmatched by any Italian food item. It just can’t be done.

I squealed with excite­ment as the chicken plat­ter hit the table. The potato salad and coleslaw, also home­made, were merely the mea­ger open­ing acts for the main show.

My dad and I eagerly reached — no clam­oured — for our pieces and bit in hard.

English nov­el­ist and play­wright Dorothy Gladys “Dodie” Smith once wrote: “When things mean a very great deal to you, excit­ing antic­i­pa­tion just isn’t safe.”

Stuck between my teeth and tongue was sop­ping mess of raw, slimy bird. And then, mer­ci­lessly, the coat­ing slid off the skin and landed with a wet slap on my dish.

Each piece was the same. Disappointment on a bone.

If we never ate fried chicken in my house before, we would cer­tainly never eat it again. To this day, remind­ing my mother of the great cottage-fried-chicken-debacle is not a good idea. It was the only thing she has ever made that turned out ined­i­ble, and the thought sparks a type of culi­nary rage in her like noth­ing else.

Now that I’m all grown up, and liv­ing on my own, my fried chicken crav­ings can be quenched any­time at The Stockyards Smokehouse and Larder on St. Clair West. A month ago, I invited my par­ents to join me there for dinner.

And funny enough, my mother did end up order­ing the fried chicken.