The story of hot chicken''s creation has become part of Nashville''s mythology, the sort of tale we can recount with practiced pauses and wry chuckles. It happened this way: Back in the 1930s - or maybe it was the 1920s or perhaps as late as the 1940s or even the 1950s - or anyway, back sometime before most of us were born, there was a man named Thornton Prince III. He was a handsome man, tall and good looking. "Beautiful, wavy hair," said his great-niece Andre Prince Jeffries. Debonair, with a dashing sense of style and a touch of Tennessee twang, or so I assume. Women loved him, and he loved them right back. "He was totally a ladies'' man," Jeffries laughs. "He sure had plenty of women.
" So this one Sunday morning, that time of the week when families across the South woke up expecting to finally enjoy some popping hot fried chicken, Thornton Prince III came in from a long night of catting around, and he told his woman - wife? girlfriend? does it matter? - to make him breakfast. Well, this woman, wife or girlfriend or whatever, she was fed up with his philandering ways. What could she do with a serial cheater like this? Some women look the other way. Others walk out. A few get even. This one took a fourth way. She wanted retribution. She started out by playing it sweet.
That morning, just like all their other morning-afters, she got up before him. And she didn''t make him dry toast or gruel. Oh, no, she made him his favorite. She made him fried chicken. I like to think she went out and wrung the neck of the skinniest, stringiest yard bird she could find. No plump church chicken for this sorry son-of-a-gun, no sir. Then, she added the spiciest items she had in her kitchen. Dried pepper flakes? Maybe.
Fresh chilies plucked from her garden with all their seeds? Perhaps. Half a bottle of Tabasco sauce? Could be. Nobody knows what went into that first hot chicken. She layered on whatever she had on hand. "She couldn''t run to the grocery store to get something," Jeffries said. Well, whatever she added, by the time the bird was cooked, Thornton Prince''s woman was sure she had spiced it up beyond edibility. As Thornton Prince took his first bite, she must have braced herself for his reaction. Would he curse? Whimper? Stomp out? And where did she go while he ate? Maybe she was in the kitchen, scraping and seasoning her skillet.
Perhaps she''d fled back to the bedroom. I like to think she was sitting at the table across from him, cutting into her own chicken - unpeppered, of course - ready to push the charade as far as she could. Wherever she was, she soon discovered her plan had backfired. Thornton Prince III loved that over-spiced poultry. He took it to his brothers. They loved it also. Soon enough, the woman disappeared from his life, but hot chicken lived on. The Prince brothers turned her idea into the BBQ Chicken Shack, the business Andre Jeffries renamed Prince''s Hot Chicken Shack when she took it over.
"We don''t know who the lady was that was trying," Jeffries said. "All the old heads are gone. Gone on. But hey, we''re still profiting from it." She paused. "So women are very important." These days, that angry woman''s dish is all the rage. It''s on the list of "must-try" Southern foods in Esquire, USA Today, Southern Living, Men''s Health, Forbes, Travel and Leisure and Thrillist.
It''s been written about in the New Yorker and the Ringer. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken Nashville-style. Upwards of ten thousand people attend the annual Hot Chicken Festival, held every July 4. In 2013 the James Beard Foundation gave Prince''s Hot Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish, and celebrity chefs make pilgrimages to Nashville to eat it on camera. Why has this woman''s chicken become such a cultural phenomenon? Hot chicken aficionados and purveyors have offered different explanations for the food''s popularity, for why it seems to grab ahold of certain people''s taste buds, embedding itself in their guts and drawing them back time and again. Jeffries has an easy explanation for it. "My mother said, if you know people are gonna talk, give them something to talk about," she said. "This chicken is not boring.
You''re gonna talk about this chicken." Spicy food appeals to people who are "more emotional - more fired up about everything they do," another hot chicken purveyor mused. "If you are a very sensitive person and emotionally hooked to what you are eating, it''s got to give you a little more, like a drug." Others suggest hot chicken is popular because it is excellent hangover food, something generations of BBQ/Prince''s Hot Chicken Shack eaters have known. There was a reason Thornton Prince III kept his joint open until the wee hours on the weekends, and there''s a reason why Andre Jeffries continues to do so. Nashville may be the buckle of the Bible belt, but it''s also Music City, USA, fully stocked with musicians and misfits who drink hard and live late into the night. "In Nashville, at least among the drinking class, folks appreciate the kind of heat that compels you to grab a first-aid manual, thumbing wildly for a passage that differentiates between second- and third-degree burns," food historian John T. Edge wrote.
"I think it''s popular in Nashville because there are a lot of people living today that had ancestors stuck on pepper," Dollye Matthews of Bolton''s Spicy Chicken and Fish told an interviewer for the Southern Foodways Alliance. "Maybe they had hypertension and couldn''t use salt, so they used pepper instead. A couple of generations like that, and you know, you just got the clientele for hot and spicy chicken." But although hot chicken has long had a loyal following, its widespread popularity is new, even among much of Nashville. My Nashville roots go three generations deep, but I had never eaten hot chicken -- or even heard of it -- when I moved away for graduate school in 2005. I came back eight years later to a new Nashville where everyone hung out in neighborhoods that had been blighted when I left, and all the transplants talked about Nashville-style hot chicken. How could a native food I didn''t know be internationally famous? Embarrassed I didn''t even recognize this dish everyone else loved, I turned to Google hoping an image search would jiggle loose a memory. The web was full of photographs of fried chicken slathered with a hot sauce that somehow kept it crispy, served on a slice of white bread and topped by a pickle.
None of it looked familiar. I asked my dad if he had ever eaten it. "Nope," he said. But he taught school in the 1970s, and he remembered that some of the black teachers carried their own bottles of hot sauce. Sometimes they''d prank him by spiking his cafeteria lunch. This was not the answer I wanted. Was hot chicken a part of the city''s history that had been invisible to me as a white woman? I asked Denise, an older-African American woman in my church who was raised in the city, what she thought. "Of course you didn''t eat hot chicken," she said, shaking her head.
"Hot chicken''s what we ate in the neighborhood." I went to the Downtown Public Library to do a very unscientific survey of what they had on hand. I sat in their second-floor reading room, surrounded by stacks of cookbooks, searching for a recipe that would prove that in Nashville we didn''t choose our chicken style based on race. I walked away with several new ways to fry a chicken. One of them added some black pepper. Several of them mentioned serving chicken while it was still hot. None of them showed me how to make my chicken spicy enough to ignite the interest of foodies and hipsters. Denise was right.
For almost 70 years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville''s black neighborhoods. For most of that time, it was sold exclusively at Prince''s.