“This Is Chicken?” — German Women POWs Had Never Tasted American Fried Chicken Before D
The sound was the first thing that went wrong. Eva Brandt bit down and the crust cracked. Not the soft give of bread, not the thin snap of a cracker, but a sound so loud and unexpected that she pulled the piece away from her mouth and stared at it. Around her, three other women at the mess hall table looked up.
Eva looked back down at what was in her hand, a piece of something golden and dense, steam still rising from the broken edge, white meat visible inside the crust. “Is it supposed to do that?” she asked in German. Across the table, Lotta Haas, 25, who had been at the camp 6 weeks longer, laughed and picked up her own piece without looking up.
“It’s chicken,” Lotta said, “just eat it.” Eva looked at the piece in her hand. This is chicken. She had eaten chicken before. She knew what chicken was. This was not what chicken looked like. To understand why Eva Brandt did not recognize one of the most common foods in the world, the story has to go back to a kitchen in Dresden.
And to every chicken she had ever eaten before the one that cracked in her hand. Eva was 22. She had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Dresden, the eldest of four children, in a household where a chicken appeared on the table perhaps six times a year. At Christmas, at Easter, and at the points in between when something needed celebrating and the budget allowed it.
Her mother prepared it the same way every time. Boiled first in a large pot with onion and bay leaves until the meat was soft enough to fall from the bone. Then sometimes roasted briefly at the end to color the skin. The result was pale, tender, mild. It fell apart when you touched it.
It did not make any sound at all when you bit into it. By 1943, chicken had become rarer still. The family’s neighborhood was on short rations, and meat of any kind was allocated by a system that, by the final years of the war, increasingly did not deliver what it promised. Eva had eaten her last chicken in the autumn of 1944, a small bird her mother had traded 2 weeks of fat rations to obtain.
Boiled as always, divided carefully between six people, each portion barely a mouthful. She had not thought much about it at the time. She had thought about it considerably since. She was captured near Dresden in the final weeks of the war and arrived at a POW camp in Georgia in the summer of 1945. Georgia in July was a different kind of heat than anything she had known, thick, humid, insistent in a way that made the air itself feel solid.
The food in the mess hall was more than she had expected and more varied but recognizable, bread, vegetables, stews, soups with real meat in them. She ate gratefully and without questioning it. The fried chicken arrived on a Thursday evening in August served by Private Dale Simmons, 20, from a small town in Alabama where fried chicken on Thursday was simply what you did.
The same way his grandmother had done it and her mother before her. Simmons had requisitioned the oil, the flour, the seasoning from the mess hall stores the same way he requisitioned anything else. With the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone doing something so routine, it required no particular thought.
He set the tray down at the women’s table without announcement. Eight pieces, golden brown, still hot enough to steam. Eva looked at it for a moment before picking up a piece. The color was wrong, too dark, too even, nothing like the pale skin of her mother’s boiled chicken. The shape was wrong, the crust was thick, almost architectural, hiding whatever was inside.
She picked it up and it was heavier than she expected, denser. The surface rough under her fingers in a way that cooked chicken had never felt before. She bit down. The crack was loud enough that Lot looked up from her own plate. Eva held the piece away from her face and stared at the broken edge.
The crust shattered cleanly, like a biscuit, revealing white meat inside that steamed gently in the Georgia heat. “Is it supposed to do that?” she asked. “It’s chicken,” Lot said, “just eat it.” Eva looked at the piece for another moment. Then she bit into it again, more deliberately this time, ready for the sound.
The crust cracked again, less surprising the second time, still startling. And underneath it, the meat was soft and yielding, and nothing like the crust at all. As if two completely different foods had been combined into one thing that had no right to work as well as it did.
The flavor took a moment to register. It was chicken, she could taste that now, underneath everything else, but surrounded by something she had no name for. A layer of seasoned crust that was simultaneously crisp and rich, and faintly spiced in a way that had no equivalent in anything she had eaten in Dresden.
She chewed slowly, trying to understand what she was tasting. “What is it called?” she asked Lot. “Fried chicken,” Lot said. Eva repeated it in English carefully. “Fried chicken.” She looked down at the piece in her hand. “They fry it in oil, a lot of oil.” Lot was already on her second piece. “Don’t think about it too much.” Eva did not follow this advice.
She ate the rest of her piece slowly, paying close attention to each bite, the way she hadn’t paid attention to food since before the war. When there was enough of it that it could be experienced rather than simply managed. The crust softened slightly as she ate, absorbing just enough of the steam to become something between crisp and tender.
And the flavor deepened toward the end of each piece, where the seasoning had concentrated near the bone. By her third piece, Simmons had come back around the table without being asked, and added two more to her tray wordlessly. The way he refilled anything that was running low.
She had stopped being surprised by the sound and started listening for it instead, the specific crack of a crust that had been made right. As a way of knowing before she bit down that what she was about to eat was going to be exactly what it had been every time before. “Do they make this often?” she asked Lot. “Every Thursday,” Lot said.
Eva set down her current piece and looked at Lot. “Every Thursday?” “Every Thursday,” Lot confirmed. “Simmons does it. It’s just what he makes on Thursdays. Eva picked her piece back up. She bit into it, listened to the crack, chewed slowly. Outside the mess hall windows, Georgia in August was still thick and hot and loud with insects.
Inside, the table had gone mostly quiet in the comfortable way tables go quiet when everyone is eating something worth paying attention to. She did not finish all of what was on her tray that evening. Not from lack of appetite, but because she wanted to take two pieces back to the barracks and eat them slowly, alone, without the noise and the conversation, just to understand them properly.
Lot told her the crust would go soft. Eva said she didn’t mind. It did go soft by the time she got back to the barracks and sat on the edge of her bunk with the pieces wrapped in a cloth napkin. The crack was gone, but the flavor was still there and the meat was still tender. And she ate both pieces in the quiet of the barracks with the same slow attention she had given the first one at the table.
She wrote home that week a short letter permitted by the Red Cross, a single page. Most of it about her health and the weather and asking after her mother and siblings. But at the bottom, in the margin, she added one sentence that she had not planned to write and could not entirely explain. They make chicken here in a way I had never imagined, and I have been thinking about it since Thursday.
And it is Thursday again now, and I am going to have more of it tonight. Private Simmons made fried chicken every Thursday for the rest of the summer and into the autumn. Until the camp population shifted and the women compound emptied out as repatriation schedules advanced. The last Thursday he made it for the women’s mess, Eva was still there.
She ate four pieces slowly and did not take any back to the barracks because she understood by then that the crust would go soft, and that was not the point. The point was the sound and the warmth. And the specific pleasure of something made the same way every week by someone who had learned it so long ago, he no longer thought about it at all.
Eva Brandt returned to Dresden in early 1946. The city she came back to was not the city she had left. Her family’s neighborhood was largely rubble. Her mother living with relatives in a building that had lost its top floor. Her younger siblings thin and quiet in a way that children should not be quiet.
Food in post-war Dresden was scarce in a different way than it had been during the war. Not rationed by a system, just simply absent. Dependent on what could be found or grown or traded for. Chicken, when it appeared, was still boiled. There was no oil to spare for frying, no seasoning beyond salt, no Thursday ritual.
Eva cooked what she had the way her mother had always cooked it and was grateful for it. She did not attempt fried chicken until 1953, when cooking oil became available in quantities that allowed it. And a neighbor who had spent time in the American occupation zone showed her roughly how it was done.
The result was not quite right. The crust was thinner than she remembered. The seasoning guesswork. But when she bit into the first piece and heard the crack, faint but present, she sat down at her kitchen table and did not move for a moment. Her daughter, 6-years-old, looked at her from across the table.
“Mama, is it wrong?” “No,” Eva said. She took another bite listening. “It’s right. It just surprised me.” She made it every Thursday after that.
