I couldn't help but laugh at myself for laughing at the people in the audience who were laughing at David Letterman's confession of sex relations with co-workers. It sounded so bizarre. But the people couldn’t help themselves. They are attenuated to hearing Letterman use the “conflict” media value to produce hilarity. When he tried to speak seriously about conflict, they couldn’t make the shift.
In media literacy studies, we learn the Human Reaction Package (HRP), which consists essentially of 12 media values – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity – and a definition: news is any thing that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. These values and definition can be found in any Journalism 101 textbook. I created the HRP to provide convenience and flexibility to the package, which drives all three media products: information (news), entertainment, and manipulation (particularly advertising).
The 12 values are not presented necessarily in order of importance, though most would agree that conflict is, in fact, the first value because of its ubiquity. Conflict is certainly felt by all people. We are born with it. Very soon after we are born, we understand that we are going to die. By age 5, children talk about dying. Life and death is the essential conflict. Because conflict is such a strong news value, in a news story in which someone has died, the death is always in the first paragraph.
Survival is another strong example of conflict, because survival means staying alive. Stories about staying alive, or how to stay alive, are very important to us. Stories about new treatments or drugs to use against diseases like cancer or AIDS are always big news. We see stories all the time about living longer by eating right or developing good habits of exercise. We see stories about global warming and other threats to planetary survival. When nine miners in Pennsylvania became trapped 300 feet underground, the media followed the story without interruption because people wanted to see the miners survive. When they did, it was the biggest story of the day. Survival is also a very strong value in entertainment media. One of the most popular shows in television for the past three years is in fact named “Survivor.”
People also pay a lot of attention to other kinds of conflict. The first mass media product ever created was a book about the conflict between good and evil. It was the Gutenberg Bible, printed in 1452, the first book ever printed using moveable type. The Bible is still the best-selling book in the world today. People are also very interested in good-and-evil stories such as crime and murder. Novels about crime and murder earn their authors millions of dollars. Crime and murder movies make even more money. Murders become particularly strong stories because they have in them both the life and death conflict and the good and evil conflict. Of course those are the two types of conflict that made the World Trade Center attacks the biggest news story of 2001.
The conflict between winning and losing is the key value in many different kinds of media stories. All sports stories are essentially conflict stories about winning and losing. In politics, election stories are all about winning and losing. Since we live in a democracy in which we send representatives to government to vote on important issues, stories about those issues are very much about the win-lose conflict. Those stories are also about the kind of conflict that exists when there are two sides arguing about how to best get something done.
There are many other kinds of conflict based on people being on two sides of an issue. War is a classic example of this kind of conflict. War also presents us a good example of a conflict about a conflict. This is the “hawks and doves” conflict. For several years, the Iraqi war has been an excellent example of this type of conflict.
There is also conflict where you might not expect it. Love is full of conflict. Shakespeare made a career of finding the conflict in love, “Romeo and Juliet” being a famous example. Anyone who was ever married, or even went steady, knows about conflict in love. This is another strong conflict value found in novels and movies.
Conflict is also a very dependable source of humor, as long as it is someone else’s conflict (people laughed maniacally at Lucy Ricardo, but could you imagine living in the same building with that woman?). Many sitcoms on television are based on a conflict that is funny. In a famous “Seinfeld” episode, Seinfeld mugs an old lady for a loaf of rye bread. We laugh hysterically. George’s fiancé dies after licking adhesive on envelopes. We laugh darkly, but we laugh. Now David Letterman admits sex with co-workers. Funny as hell, coming from him.
October 05, 2009
October 04, 2009
graynation: Sunday chicken dinner, and other amusements
Every other month, Susie would fix fried chicken for Sunday dinner. I started to pay close attention to this when I was about three, which would have been 1946. After breakfast, she would go behind the swinging kitchen door, next to the water heater, and bring out the broom.
Seeing this, I would follow her out the back door and down some steps to the back yard. She had a chicken coop built onto the back of the garage, and there were always several chickens in residence. During World War II, and after, men in the area, mostly friends of her son, my uncle, Clyde, who was a cavalry colonel in the South Pacific, would visit the house, bringing Susie firewood, produce, meat and chickens.
Susie would go among the milling chickens, select one that I am sure she had already picked out days before, and grab it by the neck. She carried the chicken away from the others, then put its neck down on the ground, lay the broomstick across it, and put her foot on the broomstick. Then she reached down and pulled the chicken's head off. It never ceased to amaze me, how easily the chicken's head came off.
She lifted the broom handle and the headless chicken ran around for some moments, then fell over. She placed the chicken in a paper bag and carried it inside, at which point I lost interest. The rest of it involved routine stuff like scalding the chicken, pulling out the feathers, washing it and cutting it up for frying.
At 10, I was taken to Sunday school, no matter how much I protested, and at 11 Susie, her three daughters, and I, went to church, St. Paul Methodist, on the north side of the tracks. After church, we stopped by Mack Eplen's Restaurant, across the street from the First Baptist Church, that you could hangar a blimp in, and picked up a pan of rising yeast cloverleaf rolls.
Autumn afternoons were nothing like today. We had a radio, and a piano, and sometimes my mom or aunts would play the piano. Professional football teams played games on Sunday afternoon in the east, but nobody in Abilene paid much attention. Of course there was no television and no computers. Clyde was a polo player, and after the war we spent many Sunday afternoons watching teams play polo on fields south of town, where South 20th is now.
On other afternoons, I would play outside or listen to the radio. It didn't matter what was on, though as time went by, I really got attached to shows like "Sky King," "The Green Hornet," and "The Shadow." The radio provided a bit of foreshadowing. Sometimes, when a favorite show was on, I took my dinner into the living room and ate it listening to the radio.
Otherwise, we always ate as a family at the big dining room table. There was a story in The New York Times this morning about the benefits to children when families all eat together at the dining table. I suppose that is true, but I also witnessed quite a number of dysfunctional things that can occur among family members eating around a dining table. Susie's other memorable employment of the broom was to chase her daughters around with it once in a while.
There was also something about touching food that made it non-consumable, and this was most apparent on fried chicken night. I suppose kids today would have some vivid mental picture of where that golden chicken on the table came from, but in those days it was no big deal. It was just fried chicken, with cream gravy, the cloverleaf rolls, and green beans or black-eyed peas, a couple of vegetables like that. Susie always ate the back and the neck, which none of the others would eat, and at the end, there always seemed to be a leg left on the platter. Susie would say to me, "Why don't you have this last piece? Nobody's touched it."
It still seems important to me, not to offer anyone food that I have touched. I also know how to cut up a whole chicken – it's a lot cheaper that way – and to cut it so there is a pully bone to wish on at the end. The short bone got the wish.
Seeing this, I would follow her out the back door and down some steps to the back yard. She had a chicken coop built onto the back of the garage, and there were always several chickens in residence. During World War II, and after, men in the area, mostly friends of her son, my uncle, Clyde, who was a cavalry colonel in the South Pacific, would visit the house, bringing Susie firewood, produce, meat and chickens.
Susie would go among the milling chickens, select one that I am sure she had already picked out days before, and grab it by the neck. She carried the chicken away from the others, then put its neck down on the ground, lay the broomstick across it, and put her foot on the broomstick. Then she reached down and pulled the chicken's head off. It never ceased to amaze me, how easily the chicken's head came off.
She lifted the broom handle and the headless chicken ran around for some moments, then fell over. She placed the chicken in a paper bag and carried it inside, at which point I lost interest. The rest of it involved routine stuff like scalding the chicken, pulling out the feathers, washing it and cutting it up for frying.
At 10, I was taken to Sunday school, no matter how much I protested, and at 11 Susie, her three daughters, and I, went to church, St. Paul Methodist, on the north side of the tracks. After church, we stopped by Mack Eplen's Restaurant, across the street from the First Baptist Church, that you could hangar a blimp in, and picked up a pan of rising yeast cloverleaf rolls.
Autumn afternoons were nothing like today. We had a radio, and a piano, and sometimes my mom or aunts would play the piano. Professional football teams played games on Sunday afternoon in the east, but nobody in Abilene paid much attention. Of course there was no television and no computers. Clyde was a polo player, and after the war we spent many Sunday afternoons watching teams play polo on fields south of town, where South 20th is now.
On other afternoons, I would play outside or listen to the radio. It didn't matter what was on, though as time went by, I really got attached to shows like "Sky King," "The Green Hornet," and "The Shadow." The radio provided a bit of foreshadowing. Sometimes, when a favorite show was on, I took my dinner into the living room and ate it listening to the radio.
Otherwise, we always ate as a family at the big dining room table. There was a story in The New York Times this morning about the benefits to children when families all eat together at the dining table. I suppose that is true, but I also witnessed quite a number of dysfunctional things that can occur among family members eating around a dining table. Susie's other memorable employment of the broom was to chase her daughters around with it once in a while.
There was also something about touching food that made it non-consumable, and this was most apparent on fried chicken night. I suppose kids today would have some vivid mental picture of where that golden chicken on the table came from, but in those days it was no big deal. It was just fried chicken, with cream gravy, the cloverleaf rolls, and green beans or black-eyed peas, a couple of vegetables like that. Susie always ate the back and the neck, which none of the others would eat, and at the end, there always seemed to be a leg left on the platter. Susie would say to me, "Why don't you have this last piece? Nobody's touched it."
It still seems important to me, not to offer anyone food that I have touched. I also know how to cut up a whole chicken – it's a lot cheaper that way – and to cut it so there is a pully bone to wish on at the end. The short bone got the wish.
October 03, 2009
A weather worthy weekend
Click on the images for a close-up.
It looks like we won't have an Acorn Fever season at all, this autumn in Southern California. Now it is Oct. 2, and we have yet to experience that first cool snap that triggers the Fever. That snap is forecast to begin later today, with the arrival of a cold front coming down the coast from the Gulf of Alaska. If the weather bureau is right, tomorrow will be cloudy, cool and rainy at our house. Given the late date of this cool snap, it has a chance to endure for three or four days before temperatures warm again. This is key. When a snap like this hits in early September, it may be only 24 hours before the temperatures have gone back up into the 90s, trapping Southern Californians in the flannels they pulled on in the gray, cool dawn.
Now, in early October, we may have a few days to adjust. We can enjoy the warmth of our flannels, long enough to be willing to put them away, this time in the front of the closet, when temperatures climb again, into the 80s or 90s, by Thursday or Friday.
Meanwhile, as the weather forecasters focused on the north, a tropical storm named Olaf spun up off the southwestern tip of Baja California, and then headed north, straight for us. I pray for such events, but they are exceedingly rare, when tropical storms - what we call monsoon moisture - reach us from the south and east. As a weather freak, I was ticked off when the weather bureau said Olaf would be steered east, away from us, by the very system that was promising to bring us our first cool, rainy experience of the season on Saturday and Sunday.
It turns out that Olaf had some swagger, and sent streams of clouds into our area before the front from the north could do its steering work. By noon yesterday, there was talk of sprinkles. By 3 p.m., light showers were possible, and by 4, there was a mention of thunderstorms. At our house, east of downtown San Diego, all this talk amounted to about 47 wet dots where raindrops hit our flagstone. The sky, on the other hand, was alive with Olaf. The showers didn't hit the ground, but they were up there. "Virga" is what the weather people call showers that don't reach the ground.
These showers do unique things, however, with sunlight. I have lived at Alta Mira since 1992, and I have seen some amazing scenery in the sky. Yesterday, though, brought something entirely new, that Karen, who snapped these images, called "sun showers." I hope I am lucky enough to see something like this again, someday, in the skies west of our house. And this weekend, we still have a rainy Sunday to look forward to.
It looks like we won't have an Acorn Fever season at all, this autumn in Southern California. Now it is Oct. 2, and we have yet to experience that first cool snap that triggers the Fever. That snap is forecast to begin later today, with the arrival of a cold front coming down the coast from the Gulf of Alaska. If the weather bureau is right, tomorrow will be cloudy, cool and rainy at our house. Given the late date of this cool snap, it has a chance to endure for three or four days before temperatures warm again. This is key. When a snap like this hits in early September, it may be only 24 hours before the temperatures have gone back up into the 90s, trapping Southern Californians in the flannels they pulled on in the gray, cool dawn.
Now, in early October, we may have a few days to adjust. We can enjoy the warmth of our flannels, long enough to be willing to put them away, this time in the front of the closet, when temperatures climb again, into the 80s or 90s, by Thursday or Friday.
Meanwhile, as the weather forecasters focused on the north, a tropical storm named Olaf spun up off the southwestern tip of Baja California, and then headed north, straight for us. I pray for such events, but they are exceedingly rare, when tropical storms - what we call monsoon moisture - reach us from the south and east. As a weather freak, I was ticked off when the weather bureau said Olaf would be steered east, away from us, by the very system that was promising to bring us our first cool, rainy experience of the season on Saturday and Sunday.
It turns out that Olaf had some swagger, and sent streams of clouds into our area before the front from the north could do its steering work. By noon yesterday, there was talk of sprinkles. By 3 p.m., light showers were possible, and by 4, there was a mention of thunderstorms. At our house, east of downtown San Diego, all this talk amounted to about 47 wet dots where raindrops hit our flagstone. The sky, on the other hand, was alive with Olaf. The showers didn't hit the ground, but they were up there. "Virga" is what the weather people call showers that don't reach the ground.
These showers do unique things, however, with sunlight. I have lived at Alta Mira since 1992, and I have seen some amazing scenery in the sky. Yesterday, though, brought something entirely new, that Karen, who snapped these images, called "sun showers." I hope I am lucky enough to see something like this again, someday, in the skies west of our house. And this weekend, we still have a rainy Sunday to look forward to.
October 02, 2009
Archives: Baseball in a blizzard
August, 2005: I had not been to the San Diego Padres’ new ballpark, which opened last year. Then last week, friends, and they are dear friends, gave us tickets and we went. The game – Padres vs. St. Louis – was a totally new experience for me.
Well, not totally new. I took a bite out of a bratwurst and momentarily considered placing it back in its plastic container and taking it to the city attorney to see if there were any laws against calling a very pale, cool to the touch length of dense protein colloid a bratwurst and selling it for $7.95 in a public place.
But I went ahead and ate it. No sense having the city attorney stalking the concourse, waving handfuls of dense protein colloid under the noses of employees, when I’ve eaten equally remarkable fare at any number of sports events in San Diego. No one who has spent several hundred dollars over the years on what stadium concessionaires call “Nachos” can speak too severely against the PetCo bratwurst.
What was new was the tenuous hold that the game of baseball had on the event. Since I last attended a major league baseball game – four years, at least – the half-innings of actual play seem to have become miniaturized intervals between promotions. Looking around the place, I thought about pinball machines I played as a kid, including one that was a baseball pinball game. Lots of lights flashing, and lots of noise effects, and, oh yes, the game itself.
That’s how this event felt. Many other new ballparks have opened recently in other big-league cities. If PetCo is the typical ballyard of the 2000s, baseball’s executives have engineered for real baseball the look and sound and feel of having a seat behind first base inside a pinball game.
But it was more comprehensive than that. The ultimate business model of entertainment media technology is to turn the outdoors into the indoors, the ominous “virtual reality.” You get a feel of that sitting outside at PetCo.
In the old days, 10 years ago, it was the difference between going to a live event and watching it at home on television. At the live event, the viewer enjoyed the freedom of subjective choice. At any moment, your eyes could go where they would, in the setting before you, to a player, to the dugout, to the sideline, to the stands, to the moon. Watching it on television, you lost that subjective freedom. The cameras and the screen objectified the view: you could only see what the camera was showing you.
At PetCo, there were constant video demands for your attention. It never stopped: screens and bright quick-cut montage visuals demanding attention from your eyes, enforced by booming digital-fidelity surround-sound commands from extremely high-energy speakers. Before last week, the loudest sustained noise I ever heard at a sports event was the crowd at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1984 when Steve Garvey hit the home run off Lee Smith to beat the Cubbies in Game Four of the NLCS.
That was a natural sound, the analog output of 45,000 throats, and lovely to plunge into and get squeezed and scoured by until you couldn’t breathe or feel, and eventually surface into the night air and survival, carrying with you out of the ballpark a sound you would tell about for the rest of your life, because there was a reason for it.
At PetCo, the sound was ear-ringing but couldn’t compete on the Garvey scale for loudness. As sustained sound, however, it was surpassing, and tireless, barrages of sub-woofing, subjectivity-gobbling sound scouring you not in a passage of glory, but with promotions, commercials, goofy quizzes, heavy metal riffs and aggressively mediocre humor shots. Just like TV. Visuals and sounds, objectifying space. On the field, interludes of miniature baseball. Beyond the outfield, a city skyline. Both were hard to see, through the digital blizzard.
Well, not totally new. I took a bite out of a bratwurst and momentarily considered placing it back in its plastic container and taking it to the city attorney to see if there were any laws against calling a very pale, cool to the touch length of dense protein colloid a bratwurst and selling it for $7.95 in a public place.
But I went ahead and ate it. No sense having the city attorney stalking the concourse, waving handfuls of dense protein colloid under the noses of employees, when I’ve eaten equally remarkable fare at any number of sports events in San Diego. No one who has spent several hundred dollars over the years on what stadium concessionaires call “Nachos” can speak too severely against the PetCo bratwurst.
What was new was the tenuous hold that the game of baseball had on the event. Since I last attended a major league baseball game – four years, at least – the half-innings of actual play seem to have become miniaturized intervals between promotions. Looking around the place, I thought about pinball machines I played as a kid, including one that was a baseball pinball game. Lots of lights flashing, and lots of noise effects, and, oh yes, the game itself.
That’s how this event felt. Many other new ballparks have opened recently in other big-league cities. If PetCo is the typical ballyard of the 2000s, baseball’s executives have engineered for real baseball the look and sound and feel of having a seat behind first base inside a pinball game.
But it was more comprehensive than that. The ultimate business model of entertainment media technology is to turn the outdoors into the indoors, the ominous “virtual reality.” You get a feel of that sitting outside at PetCo.
In the old days, 10 years ago, it was the difference between going to a live event and watching it at home on television. At the live event, the viewer enjoyed the freedom of subjective choice. At any moment, your eyes could go where they would, in the setting before you, to a player, to the dugout, to the sideline, to the stands, to the moon. Watching it on television, you lost that subjective freedom. The cameras and the screen objectified the view: you could only see what the camera was showing you.
At PetCo, there were constant video demands for your attention. It never stopped: screens and bright quick-cut montage visuals demanding attention from your eyes, enforced by booming digital-fidelity surround-sound commands from extremely high-energy speakers. Before last week, the loudest sustained noise I ever heard at a sports event was the crowd at Jack Murphy Stadium in 1984 when Steve Garvey hit the home run off Lee Smith to beat the Cubbies in Game Four of the NLCS.
That was a natural sound, the analog output of 45,000 throats, and lovely to plunge into and get squeezed and scoured by until you couldn’t breathe or feel, and eventually surface into the night air and survival, carrying with you out of the ballpark a sound you would tell about for the rest of your life, because there was a reason for it.
At PetCo, the sound was ear-ringing but couldn’t compete on the Garvey scale for loudness. As sustained sound, however, it was surpassing, and tireless, barrages of sub-woofing, subjectivity-gobbling sound scouring you not in a passage of glory, but with promotions, commercials, goofy quizzes, heavy metal riffs and aggressively mediocre humor shots. Just like TV. Visuals and sounds, objectifying space. On the field, interludes of miniature baseball. Beyond the outfield, a city skyline. Both were hard to see, through the digital blizzard.
October 01, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Chicken Fried Steak
Some places you swear you’ll never forget, but I have. I can’t remember the name of the café in Cross Plains, Texas, where the chicken fried steak was so good. Cross Plains was 45 miles southeast of my home town, Abilene, and we would make the drive regularly to Cross Plains for chicken fried steak at this place.
There was one trip in particular. I was alone, except for a decent thunderstorm, which stayed about five miles behind me as I drove at moseying speed on Highway 36 out of Abilene toward Cross Plains. The country turns hilly down that way, green clumps of mesquite and red swatches of clay, intensified when there are storm clouds around.
Every few miles I would pull off on the highway’s wide shoulder – state highways in Texas are designed as linear viewing points – and drink in the color and texture, congratulating the random cattle for this fine home they had. Five miles ahead of a Texas thunderstorm is always a still, warm, zone, no wind, no sound, into which low thunder rolls from the dark cloud wall to the north. Heavenly. I would watch until the first fresh gusts arrived, running just ahead of the cold rain. Then I would get back in the car and drive on, five more miles, then stop again.
In this way I would reach Cross Plains, and the Café of the Forgotten Name so that I was just sitting and opening the typed menu when the thunder rose from rolling to roaring, the lightning and rain crashed, and the café became a cave where some of the best chicken fried steak in Texas was served. It was one of the luckier noontimes of my life. And now I can’t remember the name of the place.
Wait a minute. It was the White Castle. I would almost swear. I know, White Castles are tiny steamed hamburgers famed in the East. Besides, why would somebody in Cross Plains, Texas, name their place the White Castle? I couldn’t say, but I know there was a White Elephant in Eastland, up on I-20, and it had pretty good chicken fried steak too. And in Abilene, we had the Dixie Pig. Massey’s, in Fort Worth. Threadgill’s in Austin. The Alamo Café in San Antonio. Chicken fried steaks as big as dinner plates, covered in cream gravy.
People like me, with memories like those, don’t go too long without making chicken fried steak at home. I put the recipe in my cookbook, which is a collection of recipes I developed after I moved to California so I could eat, whenever I wanted to, like I was in Texas. My Texas pal Ray just last month sent off for the book, and now it has arrived, and it was so nostalgic for him because it’s all the recipes his mom cooked. He also, he said, was inspired by the chicken-fried steak recipe to head for Massey’s. Lucky duck.
If you have chicken fried steak at my house, you start with a round steak, about a pound and a half, three-quarters of an inch thick. Trim the fat and cut the steak into four pieces. Tenderize the pieces with a meat mallet. You can buy round steak pieces already tenderized, if you’d rather. Salt and pepper the meat, and give it a dusting of garlic powder.
Have ready a pie pan with flour in it, and another pie pan in which you have beaten two eggs and half a cup of milk. Heat a half-inch of oil (lard, Crisco, peanut oil) in a large black skillet on medium-high heat. Dredge the meat pieces in flour, then in the wet mixture, swishing it around on both sides, then back in the flour to coat. Fry the pieces until golden brown, about five minutes per side. Turn down the heat if the oil gets too hot. Drain the pieces on newspaper.
Gravy: Pour off almost all the oil, leaving a sheen of it across three-quarters of the bottom of the skillet. Set the heat at medium-high. Add three level tablespoons flour and stir constantly until the flour loses its raw smell. If the flour mixture is dry and crumbly, add a little more oil. When the flour is smooth and cooked, add two cups milk and stir constantly until the gravy thickens. Season with salt and generous pepper, and serve on the side. Choose your own side dishes. At my house, it might be mashed potatoes and green beans.
There was one trip in particular. I was alone, except for a decent thunderstorm, which stayed about five miles behind me as I drove at moseying speed on Highway 36 out of Abilene toward Cross Plains. The country turns hilly down that way, green clumps of mesquite and red swatches of clay, intensified when there are storm clouds around.
Every few miles I would pull off on the highway’s wide shoulder – state highways in Texas are designed as linear viewing points – and drink in the color and texture, congratulating the random cattle for this fine home they had. Five miles ahead of a Texas thunderstorm is always a still, warm, zone, no wind, no sound, into which low thunder rolls from the dark cloud wall to the north. Heavenly. I would watch until the first fresh gusts arrived, running just ahead of the cold rain. Then I would get back in the car and drive on, five more miles, then stop again.
In this way I would reach Cross Plains, and the Café of the Forgotten Name so that I was just sitting and opening the typed menu when the thunder rose from rolling to roaring, the lightning and rain crashed, and the café became a cave where some of the best chicken fried steak in Texas was served. It was one of the luckier noontimes of my life. And now I can’t remember the name of the place.
Wait a minute. It was the White Castle. I would almost swear. I know, White Castles are tiny steamed hamburgers famed in the East. Besides, why would somebody in Cross Plains, Texas, name their place the White Castle? I couldn’t say, but I know there was a White Elephant in Eastland, up on I-20, and it had pretty good chicken fried steak too. And in Abilene, we had the Dixie Pig. Massey’s, in Fort Worth. Threadgill’s in Austin. The Alamo Café in San Antonio. Chicken fried steaks as big as dinner plates, covered in cream gravy.
People like me, with memories like those, don’t go too long without making chicken fried steak at home. I put the recipe in my cookbook, which is a collection of recipes I developed after I moved to California so I could eat, whenever I wanted to, like I was in Texas. My Texas pal Ray just last month sent off for the book, and now it has arrived, and it was so nostalgic for him because it’s all the recipes his mom cooked. He also, he said, was inspired by the chicken-fried steak recipe to head for Massey’s. Lucky duck.
If you have chicken fried steak at my house, you start with a round steak, about a pound and a half, three-quarters of an inch thick. Trim the fat and cut the steak into four pieces. Tenderize the pieces with a meat mallet. You can buy round steak pieces already tenderized, if you’d rather. Salt and pepper the meat, and give it a dusting of garlic powder.
Have ready a pie pan with flour in it, and another pie pan in which you have beaten two eggs and half a cup of milk. Heat a half-inch of oil (lard, Crisco, peanut oil) in a large black skillet on medium-high heat. Dredge the meat pieces in flour, then in the wet mixture, swishing it around on both sides, then back in the flour to coat. Fry the pieces until golden brown, about five minutes per side. Turn down the heat if the oil gets too hot. Drain the pieces on newspaper.
Gravy: Pour off almost all the oil, leaving a sheen of it across three-quarters of the bottom of the skillet. Set the heat at medium-high. Add three level tablespoons flour and stir constantly until the flour loses its raw smell. If the flour mixture is dry and crumbly, add a little more oil. When the flour is smooth and cooked, add two cups milk and stir constantly until the gravy thickens. Season with salt and generous pepper, and serve on the side. Choose your own side dishes. At my house, it might be mashed potatoes and green beans.
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