Q -

Sounds delicious, but since we're talking folk lore here, I'd suggest that the original real purpose of the chicken-fry thing wasn't, for us po' trash, to make it delicious, it was to take the fight out of it so you stood a fair chance of getting your teeth through it.

For veal or pork (tenderloin) you might be able to do a fair job with the edge of a plate or with the back of a heavy knife, but for the beef commonly used in home cooking for chicken fry you really should have a "tenderizer." The typical old style was a solid cast iron "hammer," about a half pound. (The one I inherited from granny is 7.7 ounces, smaller than some.) The main face, about an inch and a half square, will have about 25 litle pyramidal "points" so that when you hammer the flour into the meat you break up the muscle fiber as much as possible.

The reverse end, opposite the points would probably be a chisel like blade, about a half inch long, that you could use to sever little gristly bits, and the end of the handle would usually have about 3 little in-line chisel points for whatever needed a little extra "help." You can buy a "modern" version at WallyWorld or Target, but these are sort of "sissified" things usually with an aluminum head and a short wooden handle. You can "spank" your beef with one of them, but you can't really beat it up the way you need to for "old-style" chicken fried.

In the classic method, you flop a pound or two of thin cut round on a heavy cutting board, grab a cup of so of flour and your tenderizer, and take it out to the old stump where the elm tree fell over a couple of decades ago. Outdoors is best, because by the time you got done properly "tenderizing," just about everything within a three or four foot radius is going to be pretty well spackled with bloody flour. (In a more innocent time, you could send one of the kids out to "beat the meat" and nobody made dirty cracks about it.)

Most pork, veal, or grain fed yearling beef can be cooked to come out fairly tender, but if the only meat you've got is the cow that got too old for milking, there is so much colagen in the muscle meat that you can stew it 'till if falls apart and the "sinew" is still like chewing on fishline. The maceration to break the fibers is the only way to make it edible. Pounding the flour in while you're breaking it up helps to keep the fibers separated, and keeps them from "growing back together" in the skillet.

Of course the original purpose is pretty much obsolete, since the only beef you're likely to find will be the fat young grain-fed stuff in the supermarket. And you can get "tenderized" round steak that's been run between a couple of wire brushes to perforate it and break up the tendon fibers, so all you really need to do is spank a little flour in it and throw it in the skillet. With the time you save, you can fancy up the recipes and make it downright delightful dining – as in the recipes above.

As a footnote – it works for jackrabbit and goat too.

John