Whoopi Goldberg is having a very bad week. First she was suspended from the View after her ridiculous and objectively wrong comments on the Holocaust and Jewish people. Now a 30-year-old recipe has resurfaced that, incredibly, is causing her more trouble on the Whoopi-might-be-an-anti-Semite front:
In 1993, Goldberg - whose real name is Caryn Johnson - submitted the recipe to Cooking in The Litchfield Hills, a charity cookbook comprised of recipes from the well-heeled residents of the leafy Connecticut suburb...
Whoopi's recipe reads: 'Send chauffeur to your favorite butcher shop for the chicken (save the brown paper bag). Have your cook 1) Melt equal parts oil and butter 3/4 deep in skillet over moderate heat.
'2) Put flour, seasoned with remaining ingredients, into brown paper bag. 3) Rinse chicken parts and place in bag.
'Then you tightly close top of bag (watch your nails) and shake 10 times.
'Hand bag to Cook, go dress for dinner. While you dress, have Cook preheat oven to 350 degrees and brown chicken slowly in skillet. When evenly browned, have Cook place chicken in dish in oven. Have Cook prepare rest of meal while you touch up your makeup.
'In about half an hour, voila! Dinner is served! You must be exhausted.'
Okay, so obviously, like ... what??
Yet as a non-Jewish American Princess, I can only claim so much personal harm from this thing. What's more personally offensive to me is this so-called "fried chicken" recipe, which is, to put it mildly, really lame.
- For starters, don't rinse your chicken. It's a myth. You shouldn't do it. At best it accomplishes nothing; at worst you're splattering droplets of raw chicken water all over your kitchen. No good.
- Secondly, this is not fried chicken. It's baked chicken. Big difference! There's nothing wrong with baked chicken at all, but it's not fried. (Moreover, if you're going to bake chicken, you should do it at much lower temperatures—say, 275º or so. It takes longer but it's infinitely more worth it. Test for doneness with an instant-read thermometer.)
- Third, if you want "fried chicken," you need to fry it. That means getting a generous quart or quart-and-a-half of high-heat oil or fat—lard, peanut oil, beef tallow—and bringing it up to about 350º or so in a deep, heavy-bottomed Dutch oven or something similar.
- Marinate the chicken in buttermilk or milk for a few hours beforehand; when breading, mix in some of the marinade milk with the flour to form shaggy crumbs that will ultimately fry up into brittle explosions of salty crunchiness.
- Fry in small batches to ensure the heat of the oil doesn't get too low when cooking; that risks soggy, unappetizing chicken. Drain on a paper towel or rack.
- Eat. Ignore any cooking advice from Whoopi Goldberg.
And that's how you fry a chicken, folks—whether you're a Jewish American Princess or anything else!
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