The Chicken Sisters(63)
The surroundings were right, but she was in the wrong place, in between a visibly nervous Andy and her mother, who had dressed for the occasion in her usual slacks and blouse covered with her usual smock. Mae, with an increasingly forced smile on her face, felt her inner churning speed up. What was she doing behind a platter of fried chicken on national television? This had been a terrible, stupid idea, one that would mark her as “not one of us” forevermore in the eyes of everyone who mattered—to her career, to her whole life.
How had she forgotten the cardinal rule of the makeover/remodel reality television genre—that you never want to be the one who needs help? She’d been fooled by the different format, but now here she was, the yokel in a roomful of pros. Jay had been right. This wasn’t going to help her career; it was going to destroy it.
At this auspicious moment in her thought process, the lights came on and Simon Rideaux addressed her.
“So, Mae, tell us what you have for us today.”
Mae stepped forward, feeling as if she ought to curtsy, and gave Andy what she hoped was an imperceptible tug; he set the platter in front of the three chefs.
“This is Mimi’s fried chicken, Chef. We use the same seasoning recipe Mimi used when she started Mimi’s in 1886 as a whistle-stop. Passengers on the train used to get off and buy her chicken and biscuits in a box lunch. Hers was so good that conductors would tell the passengers they liked best to skip the earlier stops and wait for Mimi’s.”
Now it was Andy’s turn. “We cook the chicken pretty much exactly like Mimi would have, in big cast-iron skillets, with a few concessions to modern taste.”
As expected, that caught the chefs’ attention. “What have you changed, then?” James Melville asked, his expression suggesting that truly authentic cooks at a truly authentic legacy restaurant would have altered nothing.
“Well, Mimi probably would have used pure lard, which is impractical today, although we do use a blend. And it’s likely she would never have changed the oil at all, just replenished it.”
Argue with that, James Melville, Mae thought. She’d watched hours of this guy to figure out what they could say that wouldn’t set him off on a “but real chefs do it this way” tirade, and what had felt like even more hours convincing Andy that he couldn’t just wing it.
Andy went on. “We start our oil up fresh every Saturday, and we do keep up one tradition we think sets the oil up right—we do a batch of doughnuts in it first thing Saturday morning.”
“That sounds delicious,” said Cary Catlin. “Are those on the menu?”
“Nope,” said Andy, sounding, just as they’d planned, very casual. “We just sell them to whoever stops by until we run out.”
Mae would bet Cary Catlin hadn’t eaten a doughnut in years, but she could see the plan working: Cary was trying to figure out how she could get a doughnut. And she couldn’t. No doughnuts for you, Mae chanted in her head.
“Today’s went fast,” Mae said, feeling more confident now. In fact, they’d eaten most of the doughnuts themselves. “It’s pretty much the same with the chicken, and definitely with the pies, although of course those are on the menu,” she added. “We just serve what we serve, until we run out, just like Mimi used to. Legend has it that once, a customer who didn’t get any pulled out a six-shooter and offered to duel somebody for his box. And that means you ought to get here early, people.”
In New York, people clamored for anything that was limited. Mae was betting it would work here, too. Win or lose, she thought anyone close enough who saw this episode would want to come try the chicken worth dueling for.
Rideaux turned to Amanda next. “And what do you have for us?”
Mae listened to her sister go on. Frannie’s fried chicken, original recipe, coal miners, blah blah. But mostly she focused on Amanda’s haircut. It looked good. Mae’s hair would not look good like that: she was too short, her neck not long and elegant. But the short cut made Amanda’s blue eyes look huge and her cheekbones sharp. Mae noticed that Andy was staring at her sister too, the dope. Amanda, at least, hadn’t so much as looked his way.
Now they were tasting the chicken. Traditionally, the chef-judges refrained from commenting on the food in front of the contestants, and they didn’t today, either, although they did taste it—and looked at it, and compared it, nudging one another and murmuring among themselves as one held a piece of Mimi’s chicken up and broke off a crispy golden piece of skin and another bit loudly into a Frannie’s drumstick. It was hard to see whose chicken they were eating more of, though Mae subtly craned her neck to try.
Although they’d been told to remain at their posts, Barbara went and sat at a table off in the corner; when Mae looked again, her mother was gone, presumably back home to Patches, who was apparently “a little under the weather.” Mae and Andy stood awkwardly by, as did Nancy and Amanda. Sabrina, noticing, beckoned. “There’s a lot of chicken,” she said. “Try some. You probably never eat each other’s chicken.”
Amanda, of course, hung back—had she really managed to hide the fact that she didn’t eat chicken? Nancy took a leg from the Mimi’s plate and then stood, holding it and not eating, looking like someone who hates cake trying to be a good sport at a children’s birthday party.
Mae stepped toward the platter. Frannie’s chicken had long been forbidden fruit. She’d always wanted to try it. She nodded to Andy, and they both took a piece. She held hers over a napkin and took a bite.