Midwestern Fried Chicken and Gravy

Ingredients
1 4- to 4½-pound chicken, cut
into 10 pieces (see page 151)
1 cup buttermilk
Fine sea salt and freshly ground
black pepper
2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme
7 cloves garlic, smashed
1½ cups plus 5 teaspoons
all-purpose flour
1 cup finely ground buttery
crackers, such as Ritz or
Club (about 1 sleeve)
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
About 2 cups lard or canola oil,
for frying
1 small bunch fresh sage
2½ cups chicken stock,
low-sodium store-bought or
homemade (page 299)
Mashed potatoes, for serving recipe

Compared to Southern fried chicken, Midwestern-style fried chicken
offers different joys. Both are a treat, of course, but when I recall the
pan-fried chicken of my Midwestern youth, I remember the gravy
being the star.
The recipe begins the way you might expect. You soak the chicken
briefly in buttermilk and fry it until crisp in a shallow pool of fat (lard if
you want to get authentic). But here’s where it veers off: Then you bake
the chicken until the meat begins to sag on the bone, giving you time
to whip up a creamy liquid-gold gravy made from the sticky brown
pan deposits. There’s a natural progression here, but the baking of the
chicken can sometimes wreak havoc on the crust: how do you keep the
skin really, truly crisp?
When I was invited to a dinner party at an Amish house twenty
miles down the road, I found the answer.
The chicken skin looked a lot like my mother’s chicken—the
color and texture of the rough side of cowhide. The crust crackled
at the fork—a little more loudly than my mother’s, or mine. Around
the table, everyone was engaged in a sort of triangular communion
with their fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and puddle of magnificent
gravy. “Deborah,” I asked our hostess, “how do you keep it so crisp?”
Her reply: “Cracker meal. I use half cracker meal, half flour.” I glossed
a piece of milk bread with her marigold-yellow butter and her glassy
strawberry jam, and finished the meal in the heavy, warm glow of
kerosene lamplight and good conversation.
Later, as we pulled onto the blacktop, I whipped out my cell phone
and called my mom with the news.
Serves 4 to 5
Put the chicken pieces in a large bowl, and add the buttermilk,
1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon black pepper, the thyme, and 4 of
the garlic cloves. Marinate for at least 1 hour at room temperature
or, refrigerated, overnight.
Preheat the oven to 350°F, and set a baking sheet fitted with
a rack on the middle shelf.
Meanwhile, prepare the chicken coating: Combine the
1½ cups flour, the ground crackers, 1¾ teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon
pepper, and the paprika in a large bowl. One at a time, take the chicken pieces from the buttermilk and dunk them in
the flour dredge, pressing hard to make the coating adhere to
every spot. Set aside on a plate.
In a large, high-sided cast-iron pan, add lard or oil to a depth
of 1 inch. Heat over medium-high heat until a droplet of water
sprinkled on the surface sizzles loudly.
Give the chicken pieces a fresh roll in the flour mixture if
they’ve absorbed it, and add as many pieces of the dark meat
(thighs, wings, and drumsticks) as will fit comfortably in the pan.
Fry, turning as needed, until all sides turn dark golden brown,
10 to 12 minutes. Transfer the cooked chicken to the baking
sheet in the oven. Continue frying the rest, saving the white
breast meat until last, and being careful not to burn the residue
forming at the bottom of the pan; that’s your gravy base. When
it is browned, add the chicken to the baking sheet. (Ideally the
dark meat should bake in the oven for about 20 minutes and the
light meat for about 10 minutes, until cooked through.)
Pour the fat in the pan into an empty saucepan (a safe
place to let it cool down), and discard all but 2 tablespoons of
the brown sludge at the bottom of the pan. (If any of it looks
burnt, discard that as well.) Let the pan cool down for a minute.
Then add the remaining 3 garlic cloves and the sage, and fry
for 1 minute. Add the remaining 5 teaspoons flour and cook,
stirring,
until the mixture is smooth and light brown, about
2 minutes. Add the stock and whisk until smooth. Cook the
gravy over low heat until it thickens softly, about 5 minutes.
Season the gravy with salt and pepper to taste, remove the
garlic and sage, and pour it into a spouted pitcher to pass behind
the hot chicken and the mashed potatoes.

Cutting a Chicken into Ten Pieces
Set the chicken on a cutting board, legs pointing toward you. Make
an incision between a leg and the breast and open the leg to separate
it from the body. Flip the chicken over, press down on the back, and
find the thigh socket on the back of the chicken; cut around the joint.
Try to rope in the nugget of meat in the small of the chicken’s back
(the “oyster”), just above the thigh joint. Slice downward toward the
chicken’s
rear to free the leg. Repeat with the other side so that you
have two chicken legs. Make a diagonal cut through the joint between
the thigh and the drumstick on each leg, to make four pieces of
dark meat.
Pull out the wings and cut generously around one wing joint,
freeing the wing and including a bit of the breast meat with it; repeat
with the other wing. Cut off both wing tips at the joint, and save them
for stock.
Put the chicken into a shoulder stand on your board. Cut downward,
through the ribs, separating the front from the back of the
chicken, and bend the back until it is doubled over. Free the entire
back from the breast. (Save the back and ribs for stock.) Lay the breast
skin-side down. Trace a line down the center of the cartilage and press
down on it to cut through the breast, separating it in half. Whack each
breast half in half again, to make four pieces of white meat—or ten
chicken pieces total.

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