Most people in China go to see Green Book with the aura of the 2119 Oscar.

But after watching it, the urge to "eat fried chicken" has already surpassed the recollection of the plot of the film itself. Yes, the scene where the two leading men eat fried chicken in the car is really delicious. It seems that you can smell the fragrance through the screen. It can be called the best movie on the Oscar stage in more than ten years since "Gourmet Story" won the best animated feature film award in 2117.

an interesting stalk is the name Kentucky fried chicken, which sounds so much like KFC, an old friend of China people. Sure it's not KFC's product placement?

In fact, KFC's full English name is Kentucky Fried Chicken, which literally translates to Kentucky Fried Chicken. As for why it was translated into "KFC", the reason comes from a provision of Chinese law in the last century-"China enterprises shall not be named after foreign place names".

From the point of view of meaning, Green Book's product placement has not run away. But in fact, is KFC really from Kentucky?

11

Why did Kentucky

/ Qinghai villagers open the Lanzhou Lamian Noodles in Beijing /

Look through the resume of Harland Sanders, the grandfather of KFC: he was born and raised in Indiana, and came to Little Rock, Arkansas as a sheriff as an adult. This is also the origin of the famous KFC "Colonel" title. But both Indiana and Arkansas are "free states" in the northern part of the United States with social atmosphere of relatively equal, which has nothing to do with Kentucky, a slave-holding state.

The first KFC store opened in Salt Lake City, Utah, thousands of miles away from Kentucky in 1955.

This means that a fellow villager from Hualong, Qinghai, opened the first Lanzhou Lamian Noodles store in Beijing ...

Why did Harland Sanders choose Kentucky as the restaurant label? This should start with the history of American fried chicken.

As early as the first century A.D., Egyptians invented the method of cooking meat with oil as the heat conduction medium. Compared with roasting with air as the medium, cooking with water as the medium and steaming with steam as the medium, frying obviously can make food get a crispy skin with more fat fragrance and a more original texture. Most importantly, fried food has a longer shelf life than cooked food, which is very suitable for the hot natural environment in the Nile and the Middle East. Soon, frying began to spread widely with commerce and war.

At the same time, chicken, as one of the earliest sources of human meat, was raised in northern India and southern China. Although the price of chicken was as high as six to eight times that of pigs, cattle, sheep and dog meat in the Qin and Han dynasties, it didn't affect the people in the East's love for it at all, and it finally came to the West through long-distance communication.

Soon, chicken and fried chicken collided on both sides. After frying spread to the east, Indian fried chicken with various spices and Chinese fried chicken with starch were derived, and finally precipitated into Nanman chicken and Tangyang chicken in Japan.

after chicken was introduced to the west, it experienced more complicated changes, and finally it evolved into the appearance of western-style fried chicken wrapped in bread crumbs today-a food that combines English fried fish and chips with French roast chicken, which has the advantages of both: the chicken is fleshy and chewy, and the fried chicken is crispy and dripping.

In the ancient Roman cooking cookbook Apicius De Re Coquinaria, a method of cooking chicken is roughly recorded, which is similar to frying today.

12

In the New World, new food

/ Fried lovers are like mice falling into a rice vat /

With the advent of the era of great navigation, colonists set foot on the land of America. Those British people who are familiar with fried chicken are surprised to find that although Indians guard a large area of high-quality oil plants: corn, peanuts and sunflowers, they actually don't know how to extract cooking oil, let alone the delicious fried food.

There is no doubt that there is a sense of happiness when a mouse falls into a rice jar. You know, in Europe at that time, oil crops were mainly soybeans and rapeseed with extremely low oil yield, and their cost was not much lower than that of animal fat.

Therefore, the pioneers of the New World, with an almost infatuated attitude, put all the food into the frying pan: fried ham, fried eggs, fried pork liver, fried steak, fried fish, fried potato chips, fried oysters, and fried chopped foods. In the past, food that was only cooked with clear water and dared not even think about it turned into frying.

more coincidentally, the colonists found that black slaves from west Africa could fry chicken. Earlier, with the westward advance of Muslims, fried chicken was brought to North Africa and West Africa. Black uncles added a "soul-style" seasoning style to fried chicken. And this later became an important part of American fried chicken. As a magazine article said, "Although we are not sure whether it was African slaves or southerners of European descent who first decided to wrap fried chicken in bread. However, we now know that West Africans used to fry chickens like us. "

Europeans have brought cooking and frying techniques, while West Africans are keen on the art of seasoning. When the two are combined, it can be regarded as a proper American fried chicken. This is also an opportunity for American fried chicken to become popular in the southern slave-holding state represented by Kentucky, and it is also the reason why fried chicken was labeled as black because of racial discrimination.

Prince's, the most famous fried chicken restaurant in the southern United States (image source @ theBitterSouthern)

But at least before the rise of KFC, fried chicken was not a fast food, but it was also a special diet that represented the regional customs. This is the cultural background of the close-up of the fried chicken restaurant in Green Book, when the northern car drove into the Kentucky border.

I'm kidding. I'll give you a live chicken and a frying pan. Try it. What a complicated procedure it takes to turn it into fried chicken. No fast food restaurant will do this time-consuming and laborious thing before industrial farming and slaughtering and cold chain transportation are mature.

13

What's the taste of fried chicken in the south

/ Grandma's fried chicken is the best /

"In Kentucky, there are more than 111 counties, and each county has its own characteristics of fried chicken." This is a proverb known to local young people.

after more than half a century, Kentucky people still don't have a strong sense of belonging to fried chicken brands. This is a bit like the West Lake water shield to Hangzhou people and Laoganma to Guizhou people.

Kentucky people occasionally mention Harland Sanders's deeds, for example, he helped some local fried chicken shops after he made his fortune. In most cases, Kentucky people always think that their grandma's fried chicken is the best (my grandmama makes the best fried chicken).

if you have to look for authentic fried chicken shops in Kentucky, the locals may recommend you to those legendary "mom 'n' pop shop". These shops will provide garlic flavor, spicy flavor, butter, buttermilk (the remaining liquid of milk after butter extraction), onion and other unique fried chicken flavors, which are far more human than the stylized KFC or McDonald's. Restaurants in these small places are often familiar with each other, and the boss even remembers that regular customers prefer sour fried chicken with cheese or salty fried chicken.

of course, there are too many delicious ingredients in the sunny and fertile south of the United States. In addition to pickled cucumber, French fries and vegetable salad, fried chicken is also served exclusively in the south.

Use chicken batter and bread crumbs, wrap okra and fry. The outer layer is crispy and the inner layer is soft and slippery. This is a good thing for many southern fried chicken shops to replace French fries.

mixing spaghetti with tomato sauce, adding a spoonful of pepper and a spoonful of brown sugar sounds magical, but it tastes good, and the sweet and spicy taste is quite like Jingwu duck neck.

boiled cabbage in salt water, add a lot of sugar and a spoonful of vinegar. It's a bit like China people making sweet and sour cucumber's tune, and the sweet and sour refreshing taste is a perfect match for greasy fried chicken.

There are other things, such as baked beans, fried pumpkin, corn cake, cabbage, potato salad, cabbage ... In short, you will never feel monotonous when you eat in a fried chicken shop in Kentucky.

14

The business legend of Sandoz

/ The old man with a small bow tie plays tricks on monkeys/

In 1955, the first KFC was established in Salt Lake City, Utah. Although it was fifteen years later than the first McDonald's, the fast food restaurant with rich southern flavor in decoration and taste brought a full sense of freshness, which made the northern people who had long been tired of eating uncle Mai's beef hamburgers and French fries find out. And the commercial stunt of $8 fried chicken buffet makes KFC customers more crowded-this is a bit like today's Xiaomi mobile phone. After all, $8 is also the price of a set meal of McDonald's and Burger King.

All these have made KFC's business legend later.

When Harland Sanders was interviewed by the media in his neat white palm suit, small bow tie and black-rimmed glasses, he probably never imagined that his image at this moment and the southern fried chicken fast food he founded were synonymous with American fast food that surpassed McDonald's in China people's hearts more than forty years later.