Many years ago, I was the co-host of Down the Hatch, a fun and totally bizarre podcast about alcohol and food. We’d discuss anything that could physically be consumed — and we stretched that definition to the extreme.
Amanda Gibson was our cocktail and culinary expert, while Jules Hart was our foodie about town — she knew the best places to eat, drink and have fun. I was the odd one out because I could barely cook rice and alcohol is merely a means to an end.
My job on the podcast was to sabotage our conversations in my Scottish accent and bring experimental food to the studio along with any unusual culinary or booze news from the world. If you want a pimento cheese and pepperoni quiche, I got you.
During our second season of the show, I brought in some news that surprised me, shocked Amanda and sent Jules into a justifiable spin.
Hold on to your chicken buckets.
The report claimed that fried chicken, a well-established Southern delicacy, has roots going back to Scotland and arrived in the United States during the mass migration of Scots-Irish starting around 1650. It was based on the discovery of a British cookbook dating to 1747 that perfectly described a recipe for fried chicken, although it didn’t use the words “fried chicken.”
The recipe predates the first known and published U.S. fried chicken recipe that appeared in The Virginia Housewife, an 1824 cookbook authored by Mary Randolph, a white woman from a slaveholding family and a distant relative of Thomas Jefferson.
And let me tell you this, my co-host was not impressed by any of this:
“What I’m finding from my research is that Scotland is stealing foods from the British and also the African Americans who were here enslaved and making fried chicken for their masters,” said Hart in a fun and jovial manner. “And now they are gonna claim it as Scottish. Just stick a flag in it, why don’t we? No sir. Won’t let you have it.”
But she does have a point. Cookbooks, new and old, will completely
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