What Texans Get Wrong About The Origin Story Of Chicken Fried Steak
The year is 1911; the place is Lamesa (pronounced 'luh-mee-saw' by the locals), Texas. A customer at a restaurant orders two things, and the server writes it this way: 'chicken, fried steak.' The cook, Jimmy Don Perkins, reads the scribbled order as 'chicken fried steak' and a new Texas dish is born.
At some point, especially if you find yourself in Lamesa in late April for the Chicken Fried Steak Festival, you're definitely going to learn about this story. This is when the town gathers for a weekend of celebrating the delectable crunchy cutlet smothered in gravy. The festival includes a community dinner of chicken fried steak, a chicken fried steak cook-off, games for the kids, musical performances, and even hot air balloon rides.
What would happen if Texans realized that the origin story of chicken fried steak was not true? In 1975, Larry BeSaw, writer for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, gathered a few writer friends, and together, they wrote the Lamesa story for fun. BeSaw didn't expect the story would catch on and grow to be accepted as truth, or at least "Texas Truth." Neither the state nor the city of Lamesa push back much. They admit it's folklore that locals embrace to add some mystery and whimsy to the place they call home. After all, even if the story itself is not true, it doesn't change the 800,000 chicken fried steaks served across the state of Texas each day (via What's Cooking America). You get to spin a harmless yarn when you have those numbers. But if the chicken fried steak didn't come from a mistaken order, where did it come from?
Where did chicken fried steak originate?
The first thing to do is settle the name. This is not a turducken, where you get multiple animals in one dish. Chicken fried steak refers to a piece of steak that's been fried the way you normally would chicken. The earliest mentions of chicken fried steak are from Phelps's Dining Room and Cafeteria in Colorado, and Quinn's Cafe in Kansas. Each place was running local print advertisements of chicken fried steak in 1914 and 1917 respectively. The naming convention eventually made its way south, and over time, chicken fried steak became a Texas star.
The name was definitely born in the U.S.A., but was the dish? The concept of frying meat is found all over the world. Examples of this include milanesa in Latin America, tonkatsu in Japan, and Wiener schnitzel in Austria and Germany. The more likely story of chicken fried steak's origin is that German and Austrian immigrants in Texas were the first to make it. Wiener schnitzel is made with veal, but to save money, people replaced it with tougher but affordable cuts of meat that were pounded until tender. This shift that began out of survival became the preferred choice in Texas, and a restaurant staple by the 1930s. So, while chicken fried steak didn't start because of a forgotten comma, the mixture of chicken fried steak stories celebrates and proves that no matter our differences, we can all unite around a golden fried cutlet for a moment of gastronomic bliss.