By Nora Robertson
1. Back in the day, there was no such thing as pre-packaged breadcrumbs. There was no Lipton’s instant iced tea or minute gumbo. Take a cardboard can of Stouffer’s breading mix off the shelf and notice its slight chemical smell. Grandma tells me that in Texas, they chicken-fried everything. Chicken-fried pork-chops, chicken-fried okra, chicken-fried chicken. My mom doesn’t let me eat sugar. She says it ruins your stomach. Grandma learned to make chicken-fried at the age of eight because her mom was widowed with nine kids and boarders put bacon on the table. Mom doesn’t cook pork either. She says pork is the last frontier of Judaism, which makes me think of rolls of barbed wire ringing a yard like in Sophie’s Choice.
2. Rinse four pork chops, pale beige like bandages, and towel-dry. Heat ½ in. pure white lard in a pair of cast-iron skillets, surfaces oily like engines. The oil will vaporize and hang heavily in the air tinted with pig. Grandma met Grandpa at a baseball game in Springfield. We don’t keep kosher in my house. I’m not even sure what kosher is. Grandma had just graduated from book-keeping at junior college and moved here with her whole family to take an accounting job at the bread factory. My LA grandma thinks bay shrimp salad is lovely and won’t eat the rendered fat of anything, not even chickens as she grew up doing, but still doesn’t eat pork.
3. Sprinkle salt, pepper and a little chili powder into a cup of flour on a plate. The color will grow subtly complex. Whisk an egg in a bowl and cover over the bleached steak face of each chop with egg and then flour before frying. A tousle-haired, lanky man just back from dropping bombs on the Nazis kept looking over at her, a trim blonde with a soft drawl, at her, the fatherless girl with eight younger sisters. He proposed to her in front of a fireplace by Christmas, circle skirt flaring around her on the bear rug. She thought it was her chance. She didn’t know about the cabin trips and six packs of green death, the dour father and the dog-kicking. Didn’t know her eldest son would learn to box his brother’s face dancing just outside the little boy’s arm reach, that she would learn to search the aisles for Frito Lay and Dr. Pepper.
4. Let it fry up until the coating sticks real good, until it smells like only heat. Mom says kosher is obsolete anyway. She’s more worried about preservatives. Grandma slides a chop on our plates. Grandpa is halfway through his before us sisters have poked a fork into the crust. She tells us, try it. This is what things taste like where you come from.
Originally published in Alimentum.
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