Most preferred beef and pork, and did not regard chicken as a proper meat.

 

American fried chicken has its origins in slavery 

But a white man took the credit

フライドチキンは黒人文化　の続き　The Economist の記事

The origins of American fried chicken probably lie somewhere between Scotland and west Africa. The 145,000-odd Scots who made their way to the American South in the 18th century brought with them a tradition of battering and frying chicken. The almost half a million west Africans enslaved in North America brought a knack for frying and braising chicken from their own cuisines. It was these African-Americans, many of whom were forced to work in the kitchens of slave plantations, who perfected the art of frying chicken.

西アフリカ系の奴隷たちがフライドチキンの技術をもってきたわけだね。 

Chickens were not highly prized at the time. Colonial landowners rarely bothered to include them in their farm inventories. Most preferred beef and pork, and did not regard chicken as a proper meat. Instead it was considered suitable sustenance for sick men and those with weak constitutions, writes Emelyn Rude in “Tastes like Chicken: A History of America’s Favourite Bird”.

Thus it was that when, in 1741, the Carolinas revised their slave code to make it illegal for slaves to own pigs, cows or horses, chickens were omitted. The rest of the South soon introduced similar laws. Chickens, left to scratch around dung heaps and yards, became increasingly important to slaves, some of whom traded their eggs, feathers and meat.

当時の地主にとって、肉といえば牛か豚で、鶏は入っていなかった。 豚牛馬はどれいが所有するのは禁じられたが、鶏は禁じられていなかった、と。

南北戦争でチキンも食べるようになって、黒人が鶏を食べているものだから、黒人が盗んだ、みたいに言われるようなった、と。

This crime became a focus for racial prejudice. By the 1800s the link between black people and chicken stealing was firmly established in the minds of white Americans. “The Chicken Question” became the subject of great debate. Why, as an article in the New York Times put it in 1882, “in the breast of every coloured man” was there “a mysterious, powerful and ineradicable yearning for chickens”?

いまでもそうだけど、NYTって正義の面かぶって人種的偏見を撒き散らしていたんだね、当時から。 

Despite that perceived relationship, or perhaps because of it, it was a white man, Harland Sanders, who capitalised on fried chicken in the form of the Kentucky Fried Chicken (kfc) chain, which he made into a global business. In the 1930s, so the legend goes, Sanders took over a service station and began serving “weary travellers” the same fried chicken he had grown up eating. Pressure-frying the chicken allowed him rapidly to produce the stuff in vast quantities. Over time he honed his recipe and he opened the first kfc in Salt Lake City in 1952.

で、ケンタッキー・フライド・チキンが登場・・・フライドチキンは白人が発明したかのような宣伝が流通していったわけだね。