Marilyn's Chicken Fried Steak

If you’re exploring Route 66 and stop for lunch at a café in some small Oklahoma town, you are apt to learn that chicken-fried steak is the specialty of the house. Since you are on the “Mother Road”, you’re already looking for adventure, so point to the picture on the plastic menu and tell the homey waitress that you’re having the chicken fry.

When I returned home from work, I learned Marilyn had prepared chicken-fried steak for me. It was, she said, the first time she had cooked chicken fries in more than twenty years. The meal was delicious, served with mashed potatoes and cream gravy.

“Just the way my mother Joy used to do it,” she said. “Well, almost. Mama would buy a round steak big enough to feed eight of us and then she’d pound it out with a hammer until it was tender. I did it the easy way and had the butcher do the trimming and tenderizing for me.”

Here is Joy and Marilyn’s method of cooking a yummy chicken-fried steak:

Take two pans. Combine an egg and a little buttermilk in one of the pans. Put some flour in the other pan, add salt, and pepper to taste. Salt and pepper the meat and then, using tongs, dredge both sides of the steak in the flour. Dip the floured steak into the egg and buttermilk mixture and coat both sides. Coat the steak a second time in the flour.

Heat about half an inch of oil in a frying pan (Joy always used a cast-iron skillet) and place the floured steaks into the pan once the oil is hot. Cook until the bottom and edges are golden brown then turn the steak to finish browning. Blot additional oil with paper towels after both sides finish cooking.

That’s how you do it. Try it sometime if you can’t actually make it to that little roadside café in Oklahoma.

Fiction South