The Real Woman of Mad Men Cook Fried Chicken

     Mad Men transmits a dreary view of the working women of Madison Avenue and the wives at home in the suburbs.  In the forty years my father spent in the world of  New York print, he met some very accomplished women.  Alice Wilson Richardson was one of these.  Writer, copywriter and editor, her flair was visible in her home and her cooking as well.

     Here is her recipe for Oven Friend Chicken, from The Just A Minute Cookbook:


3 or 4 lb. Chichen
1 lemon
flour with salt and pepper
2 eggs
bread crumbs
paprika
1/4 lb. butter

Have butcher cut chicken into pieces.  Remove pin feathers with tweezers, and squeeze the juice from one lemon over chicken, letting it stand for 10 minutes or mor.  Then dry with paper towels. Shake pieces in flour bag. (Leave 2 cupfuls of flour in the heavy paper bag it comes in, season with salt, pepper and paprika and shake chicken in it before frying.) Dip each piece in beaten egg, then in bread crumbs, and sprinkle with paprika.  Melt butter in flat baking pan and add chicken. Be sure pan is large enough so that chicken pieces do not touch. Cook in medium oven (375 degrees F.) for 30 minutes. If it is not brown enough by then, turn oven up full for 5 minutes.

     This is so not the low calorie recipe I learned from Oprah's chef Rosie!  It is very rich, and especially delicious cold, at a picnic. 

     Which got me to reading and thinking about what has changed in the kitchen in the last 50 or 60 years a and what has not.  Farewell butchers, farewell pin-feathers.  Richardson's words on entertaining in the 1950's diagram the transition from formal dining room to a entertaining n a room which combines previous generations' parlors, drawing rooms and music rooms.  To accomplish this Richardson proposes you cook in a chafing dish, or in your fireplace. Instead of waiting on your guests, "Your guests can work and like it, too."

    Richardson reserves canned and frozen vegetables for the most extreme, "the very last minute."

     Biscuits appear on many of her menus.  At first I was puzzled that she didn't provide a recipe, but rather included Biscuit Mix in her list of supplies to be kept handy.   The solution to the "Why biscuits? Why biscuit mix?" mystery took some sleuthing.