Notable Sandwiches #34: Chicken
Helen Rosner talks hot mayonnaise, umami addiction, and the chicken sandwich wars
Welcome to Notable Sandwiches, the series in which I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the profoundly odd and ever-changing document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, I spoke to New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner about a dish that has become ubiquitous in recent years: the chicken sandwich.
Rosner is not—she is at pains to clarify—a restaurant critic. Neither is she purely a recipe writer, despite excellent tips about microwave cooking and the uses of lilac syrup. Instead, she’s a hybrid, sui generis kind of food writer, with an astoundingly broad range of interests—and a James Beard award—under her belt. In her recent stories for the New Yorker, she’s spoken to an antitrust activist about delivery apps; profiled the modern bard John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, as well as Stanley Tucci; and she’s offered a luscious ode to tomato tonnato sauce. Her work bespeaks a roving intellect paired with a fierce social consciousness, served alongside a generous helping of genuine affection for the minutiae of food. This week, I called Helen and we talked about a subject she’s covered in some detail—the chicken sandwich, in all its guises. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Talia Lavin: You’ve written about your obsession with both chicken and sandwiches, and you’ve been reporting from the front lines of food journalism for a decade. But in 2019 things got ugly. As someone who was there, what do you remember about … the chicken sandwich wars?
Helen Rosner: It was a more innocent time on the internet: the golden age of personified brands. I think for as long as there has been branding—hundreds of years—brands have had cultural associations and affiliations, and have been marks of tribal status, et cetera. I think the social-media-enabled rise of brands having personas, especially having these interactive personas, is now quite cringe when it’s on the mass scale. At first, when the Wendy’s account was being a bitch to everyone, it was funny: this is a billion-dollar brand acting like a Tumblr teen, and the juxtaposition of the two was really compelling. And now it’s every where and it’s too much. It was an era and it played out.
As an industry, fast food is fascinating: it’s incredibly efficient at making money and moving products. It’s also an interesting combination of real estate and economies of scale when it comes to food product. But when Popeyes debuted their chicken sandwich, there was a lot of fanfare.
There are people smarter than me who have written about the chicken sandwich wars and why it happened and what it means—about American agriculture and industrial food production, chicken being cheaper than beef, for example; and consumer behavior, in terms of people wanting to step away from red meat. But within the fast food landscape, it’s not a monopoly. There are many operators—six or seven different big companies—and yet, from a food-products perspective, it’s a real monoculture. If McDonald’s has a hit from one kind of sandwich, it will pop up at Burger King and Wendy’s, and somehow eventually get to Popeye’s. There’s this metastasis of any good idea or desired thing, and that happened at enormous scale with the chicken sandwich.
Your piece on the Chicken Sandwich Wars was called “The Popeyes Chicken Sandwich Is Here to Save America.” That was a bold claim!
When I wrote that piece, the headline was, I still think, legibly sarcastic. And people got really mad about it! People who I think should know better, literate journalists, asking: “What is the New Yorker saying? What does Helen Rosner consider the role of fast food?” And I think the role of fast food is predatory and insane, but I think that sandwich was undeniably fucking delicious. And it was a huge cultural phenomenon.
Your status as an authority on poultry prep was cemented a year before, when you went viral for an apparently excellent chicken recipe that incorporated a hair dryer as a kitchen tool.
I haven’t made roast chicken in the last few years that much—since 2018, four years ago, when that pile-on happened. For one reason or another, I didn’t make a single roast chicken during the pandemic, and when I have since, I’ve often had the wherewithal to be able to start drying it out a couple of days beforehand. But I have used a hair dryer for my chicken. The secret to a really great roast chicken—all fowl: Peking duck, Thanksgiving turkey—is really really really dry skin. The hair dryer is a dessicator, a tool. So if you have the time to let a bird sit in the fridge with a salt crust on it for three days, you don’t need the hair dryer. But I absolutely would go to the bathroom and grab my hair dryer and come back and prep my chicken, if I had to.
Hair-care appliances aside, what’s your favorite chicken preparation, in general?
Chicken stock. Which is, maybe, a little bit of a lateral answer, because it’s just the flavor of chicken extracted into water. But that’s hands down my favorite thing that is a chicken food: chicken stock and chicken broth and stuff like that. Even a demi-glace or a gravy—there’s something about the concentrated, extracted flavor of chicken that I find to be unbeatable, just my favorite. In terms of actually eating the chicken itself, I would say that it’s probably a tie between fried and braised. I like chicken that’s really tender and falling-apart and flavorful, and I think that those are the two best ways to get there. By fried I mean shallow-fried, pan-fried, like Southern-style cast-iron fried. Good, greasy, oily, like almost-confit chicken.
So, spill: what’s the secret to a great chicken stock?
I grew up in a pretty classic Ashkenazi Jewish family, so chicken soup and matzah ball soup were ever-present. I remember when I was in high school, one of my mother’s friends started a tradition of a women’s seder, which I don’t remember much of except that it was around the era the novel The Red Tent came out, and there was a quasi-Wiccan embrace of this sort of like, Biblical feminism. It was very pure and bless-your-heart, and my mom’s friend Sara who would host the seder was famous among all our friends and acquaintances for making the best chicken soup in the world. The method she used, I now know, was double stock, which is ultra-concentrated stock boiled in another round of chicken stock. I’ve written about it for the New Yorker a few years ago. The idea is you simmer chicken pieces in water, but instead of water you use chicken stock, and you get this roundabout double concentration.
I was an eye-rolly, cynical teenager, but the thing that got me to go to this women’s seder where we sat on the floor and talked about our foremothers was the promise of Sara’s chicken soup. I realize you wanted to talk about sandwiches, but I have so many feelings about stock. In college, when I was starting to learn to cook, I would make chicken soup when my friends or boyfriend got sick, and I learned how to make a really good stock. There are so many things you can adjust—the temperature, the parts of the chicken—and it felt very exploratory to me, formative to my interest in food. I love savory flavors, I’m a total umami head, and I think things like stock and gravy are the essence of umami and savoriness. I would absolutely rather have chicken stock or chicken gravy than actual chicken meat, which is a weird thing to realize, but it’s true.
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I’m going to abruptly switch topics back, from stock to flesh, since the chicken sandwich is the ostensible subject here. What’s the best fast-food chicken sandwich, in your opinion? What’s best chicken sandwich you’ve ever had?
The real answer is the original version of the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich, an answer that might be rooted in nostalgia more than fact. It’s oblong, not circular, and I think that they have changed the recipe over the years. Because I grew up keeping kosher and I didn’t have a ton of exposure, I started exploring the wide world of fast food when I got my driver’s license at 16, and was reborn as a citizen of the world of fast food chicken.
What made Burger King’s so special?
The one I remember was a flattened-football shape with a breading that was really heavy on the black pepper, almost to the point of being spicy. There was noticeable heat in your mouth, a relatively thick layer of mayonnaise, and that was it. There was so much seasoning in the breading, it took it to the next level. A lot of people will disagree with me, but there’s something unbelievably weird and delicious about hot mayonnaise, and so this sandwich, at the Burger King I used to go to in high school—the aroma of black pepper and chicken grease was everywhere, and this half-melted mayo—it was glorious.
In terms of ones you can currently buy without access to my psyche, I think Popeye’s nails it; the chicken isn’t too processed, it has recognizable nooks and crannies. It’s tied with the Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich, which is at the other end of the spectrum, where the chicken patty is not a recognizable animal product, and if they wanted to replace it with a vegetarian chicken product, no one would notice (and they should do that.) I get it with tons of pickles—lots of mayo, sour pickles. Just a puck of generic savoriness, and there’s something magical about it.
There are so many ways to do a chicken sandwich.
There is really something to be said, I think, for chicken the deli meat—which is not really a fast-food thing so much, but I’ve had some really excellent chicken sandwiches that are not hot sandwiches, that are thinly sliced real chicken. Like, a turkey club made with chicken is a really really delicious sandwich! I love chicken salad. I fucking love a chicken salad club, if it’s with chicken salad and bacon and toasted wheat bread. But if you’re talking about hot chicken sandwiches, for me the pinnacle is the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich, circa 1998-99.
So, lacking access to a time machine, what do you think about your average hungry Joe making a fried chicken sandwich at home?
You know, you can love something and want to eat it, and never make it yourself. You don't have to make fried chicken. There are a lot of foods that are better to leave to the professionals. More than you might think. If you want to make fried chicken, that’s awesome, but there’s a certain over-correction in the idea that we should be making everything at home all the time. It’s good to make pad thai at home, but the amount of preparation required, and the economy of scale, is such that the street vendor in Bangkok will inevitably come out ahead. If you want to make it at home, that's awesome. Vaya con dios.
Any tips for the determined yet intimidated fried-chicken amateur?
There are a lot of different methods—pressure frying with a pressure cooker, deep frying, shallow frying. I think the place to start, if you’ve truly never fried chicken before, is breaded chicken cutlets or schnitzel, where you’re using a sauté with a little bit of extra fat, a truly shallow fry, getting used to breading and brining. It’s much less intimidating than frying bone-in chicken pieces. Fried chicken is a revered food and there’s a reason that restaurants, whether they’re fast food, mom’n’ pop or fancy, specialize, because it takes focus and dedication and specific techniques and ingredients. So build up to it. And the easiest way to start is with cutlets.
The final question, and the simplest: What does the ideal chicken sandwich require?
Squishy bread—this is key. A super soft white bread or potato roll, lightly toasted for the smallest amount of structural integrity. Then, piling from the bottom bun upwards: A thin layer of mayonnaise; a tremendously juicy chicken cutlet cut not too thick, that’s been brined in buttermilk and hot sauce and double-dredged in seasoned flour (no breadcrumbs unless they’re extremely fine, and absolutely NOT battered—too much breading on the meat is the death of a chicken sandwich). Thin coins of half-sour or quick pickles—more salty than sour. Shredded iceberg lettuce or maybe paper-thin shredded cabbage that’s been slightly quick-pickled in vinegar and sugar. And then another smear of mayo on the top bun!
Yum yum!
4:47 AM and now I really Really REALLY want a chicken sandwich.
Great post!