Picnic season is finally upon us and when people start talking about picnics the subject of fried chicken is bound to come up.

As the daughter of a Methodist preacher I’m the veteran of hundreds, maybe thousands, of church dinners. So, I know a thing or two about good old fashioned pan-fried chicken. And my mother, God rest her soul, could make the best I’ve ever smacked lip over. Golden brown, but moist and tender under its just-right crispy crust, Mom’s chicken was always perfect. And though I watched, and even helped her do it a zillion times, I could never get chicken to come out exactly right, like hers.

One of Mom’s steps to perfect fried chicken was soaking it in cold salt water before cooking it. After she had washed the chicken thoroughly and cut it up, she would soak the parts in salted ice water while she heated solid Crisco (and later, liquid Wesson Oil) in her big, square, heavy aluminum, electric skillet. And although it was her favorite, I don’t think that skillet was the secret to her frying finesse. I’ve seen her turn out flawless chicken, fish, frog legs, quail, dove and just about any other kind of fried food you could want from just about any kind of pan.

And I really don’t even know where she learned to do that.

My dad always said, and Mother admitted it was true, that when they first got married all she knew how to cook was butterbeans. But she must have been a pretty quick learner, as I don’t remember when she wasn’t a good cook.

Of course when Mom started frying chickens, you not only bought them whole – sometimes you had to buy them live, wring their necks and pluck and clean them yourself. Even when I was a teen-ager and she started trying to teach me the art of chicken-frying, chickens were mostly sold whole and the way you cut them up still produced a pulleybone.

A pulleybone is the same thing as a wishbone, which is connected to the breastbone and is arguably the most delectable part of the chicken. It’s pretty hard to find a pulleybone or a wishbone, now, though, as most people buy their fryers already cut up (if they don’t buy them from the Colonel, already cooked) and chicken breasts are either split or skinned and boneless.

Either way, you get the same end result – no pulleybone to polish off and make a wish on as you snap it with a friend – unless you want to buy a whole chicken and mess with cutting it up.

Believe it or not, however, there are still a few good cooks around who do just that. I ran into a kitchen full of them recently at a (where else?) gathering of United Methodist ministers.

Kibler United Methodist Church pastor, the Rev. Herschel McClurkin, and his energetic wife Mardell, hosted one of those "everybody’s birthday" parties in their church fellowship hall and my dad invited me to go with him. I wish you could have been with us to enjoy the old fashioned, home-cooked food.
The ladies of the church prepared the supper, except for the giant, bakery-made birthday cake. Two tables groaned under rounded platters of golden fried chicken that were loaded with pulleybones, real mashed potatoes, melt in your mouth yeast rolls and all, I’m talking about ALL, the right "trimmings."

Several ladies of the church – Linda McGhee, Bonnie Minor, Janice Kibler, Mildred Kibler, Darlene Trimble, Estelle Harrison and Amy White – had been working all afternoon to prepare the supper, I learned. And when Linda McGhee heard me raving about the plethora of pulleybones to be found on the platters, she admitted to being the head chicken fryer for the party.

"My fried chicken has real pulleybones," Linda said proudly. "That’s how I learned to cut up a chicken in high school home economics – with a pulleybone – and that’s how I still I do it."

She also told me that our melt-away cloverleaf rolls were made by Flossie Kibler, who used to have the Pie Plate café in Van Buren. No wonder they were so delicious, I thought. When the café was open, it was one of my parents’ favorite places to go for lunch.

In a world where most of us barely take time to eat a meal anymore, much less cook one, it was heartwarming to know those ladies in Kibler had voluntarily spent an entire afternoon preparing food for us, even though they didn’t know most of us. But as they waited on our tables that night, they seemed to truly enjoy watching us enjoy the fruits of their labor.

As delicious as their fried chicken was, though, it couldn’t top my little Mama’s.

Linda Seubold, editor of Entertainment Fort Smith Magazine, can be reached at lindaseubold@efortsmith.com. Read her archived columns and articles online.

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