Superlatives

The House of Pizza (that is, the “Original House of Pizza” on John C. Calhoun Drive) in Orangeburg, SC, is definitely my favorite. I’m not any kind of pizza connoisseur, but this place has consistently delivered pizza that I loved growing up: Granted, it is thus probably a sentimental favorite. It was a fixture for birthday dinners treated by my aunt and uncle when I was a teenager. It has a large Greek house salad that is good for sharing before the pizza comes. The Coke is exceptionally good (sweet–lots of syrup?). There are a lot of other interesting things on the menu (e.g., souvlaki), but every time I go I have to order a pepperoni and mushroom pizza, which I never regret: It always has lots of cheese and a thin crust. I don’t usually eat the edge of a pizza crust, but I do here. When my wife, who grew up in Orangeburg, and I return home to South Carolina, this is one of several spots we like to visit regularly.

(The others, for other posts, are Dukes BBQ by Fire Station No. 2 and Sub Station II. Also, my wife liked to get boneless chicken from the Chinese food restaurant that used to be an old Hardees across from McDonalds further south on John C Calhoun Dr. With four “must-have” meals out plus whatever my mother had planned to cook for us–hopefully fried chicken–we had to start rotating where we went when we only came down for a weekend.)

There are three nominees for my favorite fried chicken. In chronological order, they are as follows:

1970s – Rachel’s in Ehrhardt, SC. Â My family sometimes went there after church on Sunday when I was little. It was a family-style restaurant in a beautiful, white, old house with a wraparound gray porch. I remember in particular two things–one was once chasing a lizard around the concrete steps to that porch, and the other is the fried chicken being the highlight of any visit. I once went back to the kitchen and saw it being cooked on the stove in huge cast-iron pans. It was a long time ago, so I don’t recall what made it so good, but I do remember it was delicious.

1980s – Zach’s cafe on the campus of Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, lunch could be a tight fit for any student who had one class ending at 12:20 and another starting at 1pm. To relieve some of the pressure on the cafeteria during that lunch crunch, they started offering lunch at the small cafe across campus near the (now old) football field. One of their dishes which I tried not to miss on the days it was served was fried chicken. The chicken breasts were large, juicy, and remarkably flavorful. I wondered for a couple of decades how they got such a good flavor throughout the meat, which was good not just by the skin but well on down to the bone.

2000s – Home. When I was growing up, my mother always let each child pick what he or she wanted to eat on his or her birthday. For a while my choice was always steak, particularly when Dad started marinating them in Italian dressing before grilling them. As a teenager, quantity became more important and I switched to Mom’s spaghetti. After I moved to Boston for grad school, though, I started requesting Mom’s fried chicken. Mom had given me her old electric frypan when I moved away. I used it in our first apartments mostly for French toast, pancakes, and fried chicken. I did most of the cooking, but on my birthday, my loving wife Debbie would oblige me with fried chicken, even though she didn’t like how grease splattered all over everything, made the apartment (later, house) smell greasy, and required a lot of attention and time for turning and adjusting the temperature while it cooked in several batches. We started with my mom’s recipe, who had in turn gotten it from her mother-in-law (with the addition of garlic salt, courtesy of my grandmother’s cook). Somewhere in the 2000s, I started using brine for some pork and chicken recipes on the grill. This led to brining the turkey I roasted for Thanksgiving as well as the realization that this was probably the source of the flavor I had enjoyed in the fried chicken from Zach’s at Wofford. In addition to this leap in the flavor of the chicken, my wife also purchased a large Fry Daddy, in which she could deep-fry a whole chicken all at once, more quickly, with less splatter, and without any need for turning and temperature adjustment. Whereas before having Debbie’s Fried Chicken was a once-a-year occurrence on my birthday, now sometimes I come home from work or a bike ride to be delightfully surprised by the aroma of chicken frying–e.g., simply because chicken was on sale at the store. Between the flavor, the frequency, and the availability, I have to give the nod for the winner to DFC.

As an aside, I note that Debbie making fried chicken is certainly an exception to the “10,000-Hour Rule”. Making chicken on average only about 1.1 times for 15 years (maybe 20-30 hours) in 2006, she was definitely an expert by then.

The turkey which stands out is one my mother made (of course) when I was around 9. She used a turkey cooker that I think she inherited from her mother-in-law. The cooker was like a miniature oven with a glass top that sat on the counter–like a turkey-sized, rectangular crock pot. That year’s turkey was very flavorful and very juicy. Shortly after that year, she started using cooking bags and/or her microwave oven to make her turkeys. She also became a hypertension nurse in later years, and her use of salt went down dramatically. Some turkeys were still good, but none stood out like that particular year’s.

My own mother-in-law uses a similar old cooker now, despite a fancy convection oven, and she produces similarly tasty results.

Runner-up #2 would be my own turkey from around 2000-2001. I started cooking turkeys in 1989 when Debbie and I celebrated our first Thanksgiving together in her junior-year college apartment. I hit my stride at the turn of the century with a few nicely juicy birds. What really made them stand out, though, was the dark, rich gravy. Some mom–Debbie’s or mine–couldn’t believe it had not been enhanced with something to turn it brown, but mostly it was the result of basting the bird with real butter and de-glazing the pan to make the gravy. My roast turkey with stuffing and gravy recipe, which I’ve followed with varying success since, is in an off-blog post on this site —http://joeyhand.com/docs/turkey.html.

My next turkey project, though, is to barbecue the bird–split it open and cook on a slow grill for 5 hours or so.  I might try it for Christmas–Debbie and her father seemed up for it, and her mom had just wanted to freeze their Thanksgiving leftovers and serve those along with a new ham, but we nixed that idea. The danger is if it doesn’t come out good, it puts a damper on Christmas dinner. Also, there’s no stuffing or yummy, rich, dark-brown gravy. Still, I’d like to try it soon.

A few years ago, I heard an NPR Thanksgiving-themed broadcast about historically-accurate alternatives to turkey. The alternative advocate argued along the lines of, “How often do you go to a nice restaurant and order roast turkey when it’s not Thanksgiving? Never, because it’s a dry, hard-to-cook meat.” Although I prefer turkey, I have to admit he did have a point: I never order turkey in a restaurant–with the exception of an occasional deli turkey sandwich. The recommended options, which would have been available to and possibly also eaten by the Pilgrims, were leg of lamb, salmon, or capon. Lamb and salmon are intriguing, although I don’t plan to try any of them any time soon on the fourth Thursday in November.

2nd in a ‘Best’ series

The best shrimp I had was at the No Name Restaurant on the pier in Boston around 1992. It was in a garlic-white wine sauce with carrots and cauliflower, but what really stood out was how tender it was.

My parents, who love seafood, were up visiting us while we were in grad school. My wife, who did not like seafood then, ordered a hamburger steak and got an openly-skeptical, but good-natured, look from the waiter. I have been back to Boston a few times since but have not been back to any of the pier restaurants since they are kind of tricky to get to. I might also note that Anthony’s Pier 4 was out of our price range at the time.

This is the first in a series of posts describing a running list of Best-something’s I’ve kept in my head over the last 20 years or so.

The first entry that I can recall is for best Chinese food, which was at Panda’s, in Ball Square in Somerville, MA.

It was a favorite of my wife (then fiancée) when I moved up to the Boston area in 1991 for graduate school, and I quickly became enamored of the fried rice with sweet and sour pork. The fried rice had a smoky flavor, possibly from sesame oil, that I haven’t found anywhere else, and the sweet and sour sauce contained pineapple, onion, and bell pepper. I don’t care for bell pepper, but the rest was memorable.

After we got married and moved out to Waltham, we tried other Chinese restaurants in Waltham and Newton, but each time Debbie asked, “So how is it?”, my very-consistent-but-truthful answer was, “[One of ‘Ok/Good/All right’] but not as good as Panda’s.” After two years in Waltham and one year in Durham, NC, saying “not as good as Panda’s,” we went back to the Boston area on vacation and made sure to get some sweet and sour pork from Panda’s. Again, my wife asked, “So how is it?” Despite three years of buildup, I finally answered, “Surprisingly, as good as Panda’s. Just like I remember.”

Unfortunately, a later trip to Boston (and reconnaissance on Google Streetview) revealed that while there is still a Chinese restaurant there, it’s not Panda’s.