Historian Rachel Martin grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, without ever learning about—or eating—her city’s iconic dish, hot chicken.
It’s a deceptively minor point in her book, Hot, Hot Chicken: A Nashville Story, which explores Music City history through this dish and the undeniably racist “urban renewal” policies that gutted her hometown’s Black neighborhoods. Still, it’s a point to which I kept returning. I wondered: How could she not have known this delicacy created within miles of her home, or its roots in a legendary lovers’ spat? Suffice it to say the answer lies in persistent racial, spatial, and culinary segregation, which kept hot chicken in Black Nashville for years—and the author and her family in white Nashville until her adulthood.
As the hot-chicken origin story goes, infidelity is the mother of invention. Sometime, probably around the 1930s, pretty-man Thornton Prince III’s wandering eye led indirectly to this gastronomic breakthrough. Thornton incensed his lover after staying out all night. The woman-at-home suspected he’d been gallivanting with another woman and prepared a hearty breakfast of blistering-peppery fried chicken, designed to punish his palate and make a point. Thornton was apparently oblivious to her heartache and heartburn, but loved the chicken. He saw a marquee menu item for his “chicken shack.” And so that act of “he-won’t-do-right” cooking planted the seeds for his family’s modern business, now known as Prince’s Hot Chicken.
What began as local love-hate on a plate has become a national phenomenon. The family-owned restaurant won a coveted James Beard Foundation America’s Classic award in 2013. This hyperlocal specialty has spawned countless imitators, from fast-food chains—KFC came to Nashville for “inspiration” —to food trucks and restaurants nationwide. A particularly bourgeois version is currently enticing New Yorkers to wait up to eight weeks for a $35 three-piece (laced with peppercorns and accompanied by almond-pesto sweet potatoes). You can even buy hot-chicken pizza, heavy on the pickles and drizzled with sriracha.
How did Prince’s hot chicken become a trendsetter? And, more generally, how do Black culinary novelties leap into white consciousness? Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer; region, mode of creation, historical period, market trends, and access to capital all factor in. And goals do, too. Not every Black food innovator starts in the same place or aims to serve the same population (and may not indeed aim to specifically serve Black audiences). And access to white markets doesn’t ensure commercial success.
Martin’s account is equal parts mystery, policy explainer, and entertaining business and food history. But hot chicken, as told through Martin’s book, pushed me to think about how Black food migrates into white communities, a larger cultural process that the book leaves too implicit until its later chapters. That process includes multiple ways a food is racialized, consumed, commercialized, rendered fashionable, and ultimately co-optable. Black food innovations spread first inside African-American communities, before gradually penetrating layers of racial segregation—past or present—to register with successive generations of white diners.