Mrs. Webb's Fried Chicken

Or: Goodbye, Toppie Smellie

Good Fried Chicken makes for Good Fried Chicken sandwiches.

I do not come from fried chicken people.

Our poultry was generally roasted and served on Sundays alongside cubed and greasy Russets, canned corn, and the saddest of green salads. In our home, mashed potatoes were for holidays, biscuits sprung fully formed from a brutalized paper tube, and the concept of slowly cooked greens was alien and possibly terrifying to our mother who had banned even spinach from her kitchen. We were not Southern people. We were Southern California people.

June Lockhart ruining fried chicken for a generation of children.

On the infrequent occasions when fried chicken was made, it was of the Shake ‘n Bake® variety— legs and thighs tossed in a plastic bag with herbed and spiced flour, then thrown into an oven and ignored until the oven clock pinged. The method was one that never failed to underwhelm those who ate it and, somewhere along the way, we switched brand allegiance to Oven Fry®. This decision was in no small part based on my enthusiasm for the name of one of its spokespeople— Toppie Smellie.

The legend herself.