From Vojvodina, with lard.
by Luke Fater, January 30, 2020
Smiljka and Manojlo Topalsky weren’t the only Eastern Europeans to leave home for a burgeoning Ohio farm-town called Barberton in the early 1900s. Their grandson, Milos Papich, points out that one of the oldest Serbian social clubs in the country is there, an hour south of Akron. The emigrated family owned a successful 300-acre dairy farm for decades.
During the Great Depression, though, the Topalskys lost everything but the farmhouse. Luckily, Smiljka could still cook.
Once they had a taste, they couldn’t get enough. The chicken became an overnight hit among town denizens, and love of Smiljka’s fried chicken wove itself into the fabric of the community. “It kind of fell into their lap,” says Papich. “My grandparents never would have dreamed that the food they grew up with would be so well-received.”
Within seven years of putting Serbian fried chicken on their farmhouse menu, the Topalskys were able to buy back 65 acres of land from the bank, says Papich, current owner of 87-year-old Belgrade Gardens. The restaurant stayed with the family as much as pahovana piletina stays with Barberton. And to the purists in this still chicken-smitten town, Smiljka’s original dish is all but scripture.
This “porcine baptism,” writes John T. Edge, author of Fried Chicken: An American Story, leaves the chicken “sheathed in a crisp but slightly chewy mantle.” Papich says the frying method leaves the poultry with soft, porky notes. As made standard by Belgrade Gardens, restaurants plate the customer’s selected cuts of chicken with coleslaw, french fries, and a “hot sauce” born of Serbian djuvuce. The meal has survived in Barberton for nearly 100 years without venturing much beyond it.
And they could be eaten quickly. Throughout the 1960s, Ron Koltnow, author of Barberton Fried Chicken: An Ohio Original, claims Barbertonians ate 30,000 chicken meals, or some seven tons of chicken every week. On Mother’s Day 1969 alone, he claims, the small town ate 25,000 chicken meals. So fervorous was the fowl-frenzy that Koltnow’s Ukrainian Jewish grandparents allegedly broke kosher to partake in the hyper-local food fad. During a decade that Koltnow termed “the golden age of chicken” in an interview with Cleveland Magazine, Barberton declared itself the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World,” a moniker yet unchallenged.
For his part, Edge, who quite literally wrote the book on fried chicken, proposes the town has earned at least the title “Fried Chicken Capital of America.”
While the remaining chicken houses of Barberton all pay homage to the same seminal meal, minor variations in sourcing, breading, and frying earned each chicken house its own character. Each Barberton family, in turn, has their own preferred house, while neighborly owners engage in mild rivalries.
“Everyone has their favorites. We think we’re the best, they think they’re the best,” says Papich. In fact, Belgrade Gardens’s fried chicken went head-to-head with Whitehouse’s in a 2010 episode of Food Network’s “Food Feuds.” “We won, but there’s no reason to be argumentative,” says Papich.
“We’re all shells of what we used to be,” says Marble. He recalls people lining up around the corner with a police officer directing traffic out front. “We’re far from that anymore. New blood doesn’t want home cooking.” He cites the recent proliferation of fast-food establishments across town as unhelpful competition; they certainly make 20-minute fried chicken feel like slow food.
“Families just don’t sit down for dinner anymore,” says Papich, who notes that his take-out business, if nothing else, is expanding. When asked if he’d compromise his Barberton fried chicken dish to, say, cut down on wait time or cost, he wastes no time answering. “I’d rather close on a high note than water things down. My parents would agree. My grandparents would agree.”
Source: Atlas Obscura
