Storme Piedmont Hills Fried Chicken

This recipe comes from the Piedmont Hills of North Carolina. It has been reworked for modern tastes and cooking. The use of vinegar will produce such a juicy piece of meat you may want to use it over and over. Honoring Stonewall veteran Storme DeLarverie. Read about this LGBT hero after the recipe.

Cooking chicken in vinegar is a staple of the Philippines. Here is a recipe from “up a holler”. The vinegar reacts well with the chicken flesh to produce a wonderful taste. Here we add the taste of a low salt soy sauce and a bit of Worcester to bring out the umami or savory flavor.

INGREDIENTS

4 chicken thighs, bone in - skin on

1⁄4 cup white wine vinegar

1⁄4 cup soy sauce

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1⁄8 tsp each:

salt

pepper

garlic powder

onion powder

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Lightly grease a 13 x 9-inch pan. Line a baking pan with foil, place in a rack and spray with cooking spray 

In a bowl combine the vinegar, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce. Place the thighs in skin side down and let sit for about 3 minutes.

Remove and place on rack skin side up.

Season with the salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Remove the chicken from the oven, and baste with the vinegar/soy mixture. Bake 15 minutes longer.

Pour the rest of the sauce over the thighs.

Return to the oven, and continued baking for 15 minutes,

until the skin is golden brown and crispy.

Check with an instant read thermometer to reach 170 degrees, yes this seems high but the thighs are much more juicy when they reach the higher temperature.

Slave served this along with some left-over rice risotto and microwaved broccoli florets.

For our music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RXe8_Ws9XA

So happy to find this recipe just for my Master Indy.

socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon

Stormé DeLarverie

Stormé DeLarverie (December 24, 1920 – May 24, 2014) was a butch lesbian whose scuffle with police has been identified as the spark that ignited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action.

She is remembered as a gay civil rights icon and entertainer, who performed and hosted at the Apollo Theater and Radio City Music Hall. She worked for much of her life as a singer, bouncer, bodyguard and volunteer street patrol worker. She became the "guardian of lesbians in the Village."

DeLarverie's father was White; her mother was African American, and worked as a servant for his family. According to DeLarverie, she was not certain of her actual date of birth. She celebrated her birthday on December 24.

As a bi-racial child, DeLarverie faced bullying and harassment. As a teenager Storme rode jumping horses with the Ringling Brothers Circus. She stopped riding horses after being injured in a fall. She realized she was gay near the age of eighteen.

Her partner, a dancer named Diana, lived with her for about 25 years until Diana died in the 1970s. According to friend Lisa Cannistraci, DeLarverie carried a photograph of Diana with her at all times.

The Jewel Box Revue

From 1955 to 1969 DeLarverie toured the black theater circuit as the MC and only drag king of the Jewel Box Revue, North America's first racially integrated drag revue.

The revue regularly played the Apollo Theater in Harlem, as well as to mixed-race audiences, something that was still rare during this time. She sang as a baritone.

During shows audience members would try to guess who the "one girl" was, among the revue performers, and at the end Stormé would reveal herself. She often wore tailored suits and sometimes a mustache that made her "unidentifiable" to audience members.

Storme knew both Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday and drew much inspiration and help from them. At that time there were very few drag kings performing, her unique drag style and subversive performances set a historic precedent. She became celebrated and very influential.

With her theatrical experience in costuming, performance and makeup, biracial DeLarverie could pass as either a man or a woman, Black or white. Offstage, she cut a striking, handsome, androgynous presence, and inspired other lesbians to adopt what had formerly been considered "men's" clothing as street wear. She was often photographed in three piece suits and "men's" hats. She is now considered to have been an influence on gender-nonconforming women's fashion decades before unisex styles became accepted.

Fifty years later, the events of June 27-28, 1969, have been called "the Stonewall riots." However, DeLarverie was very clear that "riot" is a misleading description:

“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn't no damn riot.”

— Stormé DeLarverie

At the Stonewall rebellion, a scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs, who may have been Stormé, was roughly escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. She was brought through the crowd by police several times, as she escaped repeatedly. She fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. They may or may not have thought it was just another man. Described by a witness as "a typical New York City butch", she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness stated, announcing that her handcuffs were too tight. She was bleeding from a head wound as she fought back. Stormé was the woman, that sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, "Why don't you guys do something?"

After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went "berserk": "It was at that moment that the scene became explosive."

"'Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it's rumored that she did, and she said she did,' said a friend of DeLarverie and owner of the Village lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson. 'She told me she did.'"

Whether or not DeLarverie was the woman who fought her way out of the police wagon, all accounts agree that she was one of several butch lesbians who fought back against the police during the uprising.

DeLarverie's role in the Gay liberation movement lasted long after the uprisings of 1969.

In the 1980s and 1990s she worked as a bouncer for several lesbian bars in New York City. She was a member of the Stonewall Veterans' Association. She was a regular at the gay pride parade. For decades Delarverie served the community as a volunteer street patrol worker, the "guardian of lesbians in the Village."

From DeLarverie's obituary in The New York Times:

“Tall, androgynous and armed – she held a state gun permit – Ms. DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues into her 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. She was on the lookout for what she called "ugliness": any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of her "baby girls." ... "She literally walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero. ... She was not to be messed with by any stretch of the imagination.”

In addition to her work for the LGBT community, she also organized and performed at benefits for battered women and children. When asked about why she chose to do this work, she replied, "Somebody has to care. People say, 'Why do you still do that?' I said, 'It's very simple. If people didn't care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being black, raised in the south.' I said, 'I wouldn't be here.'"

On June 7, 2012, Brooklyn Pride, Inc. honored Stormé DeLarverie at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture.

On April 24, 2014, DeLarverie was honored alongside Edith Windsor by the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, "for her fearlessness and bravery" and was also presented with a proclamation from New York City Public Advocate, Letitia James.

In June 2019, DeLarvarie was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn.

DeLarverie suffered from dementia in her later years. From 2010 to 2014, she lived in a nursing home in Brooklyn. Though she seemingly did not recognize she was in a nursing home, her memories of her childhood and the Stonewall Uprisings remained strong.

She died in her sleep on May 24, 2014, in Brooklyn. No immediate family members were alive at her time of death. The cause of death was a heart attack.