Rachel Louise Martin’s new book Hot, Hot Chicken explores the history of Nashville’s most famous food: volcanic spice-encrusted fried chicken. The book expands on a story Martin wrote for The Bitter Southerner, exploring the origins of the now-classic dish, and how those origins had escaped her view when she was growing up. The fiery bird is all but ubiquitous now from one end of Music City to the other, and as far away as Los Angeles and Australia. But not long ago at all, it was mostly known only among Black Nashvillians.
“Focusing on a single dish and the branches of the Prince family who created it, Rachel Louise Martin uses Nashville’s signature, world-famous hot chicken to guide us through the history of a quintessential southern American town,” writes chef, author and Parnassus favorite Carla Hall. “This book serves as a comprehensive guide to a great city and to the people who were positively influenced by the very African American culture it sought, so often, to undermine.” We could hardly say it better. The following excerpt is taken from the introduction.
My Nashville roots go three generations deep, but I had never eaten hot chicken — or even heard of it — growing up. I moved away for graduate school in 2005. I came back eight years later to a new Nashville where everyone hung out in neighborhoods that had been called “blighted” when I left. Folks said a hundred people a day were moving to the city, and all the transplants ate Nashville-style hot chicken. This local dish I didn’t know had become internationally famous.
Embarrassed I didn’t even recognize this dish everyone else loved, I turned to Google hoping an image search would jiggle loose a memory. The web was full of photographs of fried chicken slathered in hot sauce a stomach-curdling shade of orange, served on a slice of Bunny white bread and topped by a crinkled dill pickle slice. None of it looked familiar.
I asked my dad if he had ever eaten it. “Nope,” he said. But he taught school in the 1970s, and he remembered that some of the Black teachers carried their own bottles of hot sauce. Sometimes they’d prank him by spiking his cafeteria lunch.
This was not the answer I wanted. Was hot chicken a part of the city’s history that had been invisible to me as a white woman? I asked Denise, an older African American woman in my church who was raised in the city, what she thought. “Of course you didn’t eat hot chicken,” she said, shaking her head. “Hot chicken’s what we ate in the neighborhood.”
Still hoping I was wrong, I went to the downtown public library to do a very unscientific survey of what they had on hand. I sat in their second-floor reading room, surrounded by stacks of cookbooks published by the Junior League and the extension agency and local restaurateurs, searching for a recipe proving that in Nashville we didn’t choose our chicken style based on race. I walked away with several new ways to fry a chicken. One of them added some black pepper. Several of them mentioned serving chicken while it was still hot. None of them showed me how to make my chicken spicy enough to ignite the interest of foodies and hipsters.
Denise was right. For almost seventy years, hot chicken had been made and sold primarily in Nashville’s Black neighborhoods. Most of that time, it was sold exclusively at Prince’s.
Since I’ve come back, I’ve learned to see multiple different Nashvilles. My city chooses which face it shows each person. There have been moments when we’ve tried to unify ourselves, but our efforts usually end in failure because we’ve built our divisions into our government, our schools, our food, our very landscape.
Not all Southern history dates from the Civil War, but that’s where this story begins. The Civil War was Nashville’s first urban planning initiative, ad hoc and piecemeal though it was, and it created the neighborhoods where hot chicken incubated for perhaps half a century, vastly popular among Black Nashville but unnoticed by all but a handful of white eaters. Since the Civil War 150 years ago, Nashville has weathered five more waves of change. The projects have had different names — slum clearance, urban renewal, Model Cities, Enterprise Zones, gentrification — but each one has had the same goal, to unwind the independence that planted itself in the spaces the refugees claimed when they stole themselves away from slavery and declared their freedom. Today, new Nashville is spreading those divisions even further apart.
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Excerpted from Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story by Rachel Louise Martin. Copyright © 2021 by Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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