Nashville-style Hot Chicken is the Music City’s claim to culinary fame. Entrenched in the city’s history, but is also fresh enough to contribute to Nashville’s exploding national popularity as
a hip, creative urban scene, Hot Chicken is an addiction, a punishment, and a sweet, spicy salvation to those who’ve had it. Hot Chicken is action eating: physical, mental, and spiritual all at
once. In The Hot Chicken Cookbook, Timothy Davis, a southerner and Nashville resident/writer, traces the dish’s origins back to the late 1930’s at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, a story of love
gone wrong, and follows the trail to its white-hot buzz of today. For more perspective on devotion, he visits the Nashville Hot Chicken Festival and talks chicken with Food Network personality
Andrew Zimmern, Southern Foodway Alliance president John T. Edge, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, writer of “Return to Hot Chicken.” The Hot Chicken Cookbook includes over two dozen recipes for
main dishes and sides from Nashville’s finest Hot Chicken restaurants, along with a resource of the national Hot Chicken scene so the fiery, spicy bird of burn can be masochistically enjoyed at
home or on the road.
