Andrew Zimmern On The Thrills Of Eating Hot Chicken

Nashville-style hot chicken is the Music City's claim to culinary fame. Entrenched in the city's history but also fresh enough to contribute to Nashville's exploding national popularity as a creative urban scene, hot chicken is an addiction and a sweet, spicy salvation to those who've had it. In The Hot Chicken Cookbook, Timothy Davis, a chef, writer and Nashville resident, traces the dish's origins back to the late 1930s at Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, a story of love gone wrong, and follows the trail to its white-hot buzz of today. Yesterday, we reprinted a section detailing the so-called "ten commandments" of eating the dish. In this excerpt, television personality, chef and food writer Andrew Zimmern recounts his personal experiences with hot chicken.

I'm blessed. I've been eating Hot Chicken — or what the rest of the world calls Nashville Hot Chicken — for 40 years, ever since my dad first took me to the Music City on one of his business trips, and we swung by Prince's Hot Chicken Shack for a half-dozen pieces of "hot" served with white bread and pickles. Technically, extra pickles, since that's the only way my dad ate Hot Chicken... with lots and lots of pickles.

I love fried chicken, but I really love the Hot Chicken that they serve in Nashville. The bodily intake of extra oil — a given considering the cooking technique — the heat of the chilies (typically cayenne), and the mandatory infantile joking about the "hotter on the way out than on the way in" factor are my kind of bonus issues. The last time I ate at Prince's, I had lunch there with Lorrie Morgan and André Prince. They asked me where I was headed and as I got up from our table, I told them I was on my way to the airport. André slapped her leg, giggling, and said she felt sorry for the people sitting around me.

In all seriousness, there is something holy and communal about sharing a nicely fried platter of yardbird, especially one with such a great story. Food is great, but food with a story is even better. With the gospel of Nashville Hot Chicken going global, books like this one and hundreds of restaurants in and around Tennessee serving the stuff (Hattie B's is my new favorite), it's a great time to hear these stories, because it makes the eating so much more delightful. My most recent one goes like this:

Last time I was in Nashville, I got the opportunity to stand in the kitchens of Hattie B's and Prince's on the same day and watch the stuff cook. Later that night I got to watch Erik Anderson, then the chef at Nashville's Catbird Seat, cook and serve me his inspirational version of it. I loved them all. And the overall effect was a perspective-changer. Hot Chicken's general ingredients are all essentially the same, but the outcomes of the marriage of ingredient and technique result in widely divergent plates of food. Pre-seasoning or brining, dredging or battering, frying and then seasoning again with a cayenne pepper sauce or paste rubbed or pressed into the crispy coating: They all look like Hot Chicken, but they aren't the same.

At Hattie B's, three generations of the Bishop family take pride in the insane quality of their bespoke bird. And it shows — despite being the new kids in town, they have the experience to make a superior bird. The tile and the stainless steel in the kitchen were spotless. The bird was perfection. Moist and tender, tasting of real poultry and sheathed in a crispy brown mantle of skin and batter, pressed and rubbed with their version of the classic pepper "paste" that all good Hot Chicken comes bathed in. For me, it's still the plate I measure all others against. And don't skip that pimento mac n' cheese!

At Prince's, they used to use skillets for their chicken frying, but now they use a fleet of deep fryers, using some of the oil they fry in to loosen the chili paste for a robust slather after the bird comes out of the fryer and into the seasoning bowl. This is the old world experience, befitting a roadside joint that's been in business for over 75 years. And a small concession to keep the supply of Hot Chicken rolling out the door feeding lines that are long at lunch and dinner, and even longer late in the evening!

Those lines started in the 1930s when Thornton Prince, the great uncle of current owner André Prince Jeffries, first opened his chicken shack. According to Jeffries, the creation of Hot Chicken was a lucky accident. Apparently great-uncle Thornton was quite the ladies' man, and after a night spent with [another woman, his then-girlfriend] cooked him a fried chicken breakfast with buckets of extra hot pepper as revenge for his womanizing. Ironically, Thornton decided he loved the stuff and with his brothers opened the BBQ Chicken Shack Café. That was almost 85 years ago.

Food is great. Food with a story is better. Food with a story you haven't heard before is best of all. Nashville Hot Chicken has been captivating our attention as a culture for generations because it's been incubated in secret, under hyper-local circumstances. So now, as the story unfolds, the thrill is going global and influencing a whole world of chefs and eaters.

Standing in the kitchen with Erik, with plates of Prince's and Hattie B's Hot Chicken still sweating out of my pores, I watched a world-class modernist chef — a carpet-bagging Midwestern restaurateur — serve me a two-bite portion of Hot Chicken skin with Wonder Bread emulsion and a homemade pickle that might be the best taste of Hot Chicken I've ever had. It got me thinking: How many other foods are that inspirational, that revelatory of a place and an attitude of a city, a food with a story so powerful that young rock star chefs can't wait to put their version up on the line?

That's what Hot Chicken is all about. André put it best once in an interview with the Southern Foodways Alliance when she said it's "old school," which, to me, is always best.

"This chicken cannot be rushed; it cannot be rushed. To be right it takes time. And then sometimes when we give it to the customers too fast they don't want it; they think something is wrong with it 'cause they're used to waiting. So I find that rather odd, but — that's the way they expect it 'cause that's the way it usually is but it takes time to cook the chicken right. It's not a fast-food; we're definitely not a fast-food restaurant. It's old-time; it's like old-school."

Excerpted from The Hot Chicken Cookbook by Timothy Charles Davis. Copyright © 2015 by Timothy Charles Davis and Spring House Press.