re: Popeyes Sandwich Strikes a Chord for African-Americans

So you read this article and then say "Black people must like Popeye's...". Tell me the prog next you doesn't say "What a racist statement..".

More breakthrough journalism from the Double-Standard Times.

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Ginger was used, but I don't think it made it into the fried chicken recipe.

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Ya, I haven't been able to find any examples of ginger or paprika being used in fried chicken recipes (or chicken recipes at all really) but my comment was more about how they were available at the time so I can't rule out they weren't used in fried chicken at the time.

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Fair enough. I think we're probably arguing against slightly different arguments from different people anyway.

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I think we are. I joined in to dispel the notion that West Africans had no tradition of frying chicken in oil. I honestly thought you were trying to downplay the West African influence, so sorry about the confusion.

On that note, if you're interested in trying out "pre-colonial" style fried chicken, the recipe from Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Domesticum is really, really good...and tastes very different from what we're used to now as "traditional" fried chicken.

As I said earlier, I've also made the Pullum Parthicum recipe from Apicius which is also phenomenal, if not fried chicken as we know it today.

(if you can't tell I have a thing for historical cooking)

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I still haven’t seen any evidence of battered and fried chicken from west Africa.

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So are you asking if the West African dishes covered their chicken in flour and eggs before frying?

Bro American south fried chicken evolved from west african cuisine. #fact

I don't want to start any more controversy but crawfish were a native species to Africa too before being brought over to the US during the slave trade. They are all over west and south africa.

Also where do you think hurricanes come from? West africa.

fr33, you need to open your eyes and listen to some Dick Gregory.

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I don't want to start any more controversy but crawfish were a native species to Africa too before being brought over to the US during the slave trade. They are all over west and south africa.

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Where are y’all getting all this wrong information? It’s exactly the opposite. Crawfish were imported into Africa from North America.

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There are three families of crayfish, two in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere (Gondwana-distributed) family Parastacidae, with 14 extant genera and two extinct genera, live(d) in South America, Madagascar and Australasia. They are distinguished by the absence of the first pair of pleopods.[14] Of the other two families, the three genera of the Astacidae live in western Eurasia and western North America, while the 15 genera of the family Cambaridae live in eastern Asia and eastern North America.

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Because I’m not finding much evidence that wheat is native to west Africa

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Wheat is not native to a lot of places. The two Neolithic founder crops are native to the Fertile Crescent, and transported elsewhere. We do know that the banks of the Nile were particularly good places to grow wheat, as Egypt was known as the breadbasket of Rome, and the area was so rich that the Ottomans used tax receipts from Egyptian agriculture production to balance their treasury. So we know it could grow in Africa. Given that the Nile Basin transversed the Sahara, and we have plenty of records of interaction between the Horn of Africa and Egypt proper, we can assume that wheat made it to East Africa specifically. West African cuisine features flour of bread and from plantains, it's probable that the groups we are discussing in West Africa had some sort of access to flour. Plantains were not native to Africa either, and probably traveled the same route to West Africa, where it became a staple food. There was also the movement of people from East to West, as many cultures in the area have founding myths that date to the fall Nubia in the 4th century, which indicates that they had interaction with the Nile basin.

About the chicken recipe specifically, it's more difficult to pinpoint. It's probable that it was used, but finding definitive evidence would be too time-consuming.

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I still haven’t seen any evidence of battered and fried chicken from west Africa.

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Pythons don't naturally feed on alligators. However, after first being introduced into the Florida everglades by what I assume was a meth head in flip flops and a mean New Iberia hairdo named Junior, they have been essentially pushing the apex predator of the ecosystem out by eating their food, and most of all, THEM.

When slaves were brought over from Africa, their culture was essentially eradicated and replaced by survival. They quickly found out that cooking the small, shitty pieces of meat they were allowed in boiling pig lard significantly increased the caloric content dramatically. Made food more satusfying and provided more energy. It became part of their culture because they made it taste good in spite of the conditions.