The Heat Seeker: Into the Heartland

Travel Stories: Alison Stein Wellner likes her food hot and spicy. To find out how hot and spicy, she searched the world for heat. Part five of five: From Nashville to Indianapolis.

05.15.09 | 10:59 AM ET

Photo by Nicolas*, via Flickr (Creative Commons)

I was in Nashville to research a loosely conceived story about music and barbecued meat when a local friend asked whether I’d ever had hot chicken.

“As opposed to cold chicken?” 

“No! It’s ...” she struggled to find the words. “It’s the hottest fried chicken in the world!”

Say no more.

I followed my Google map to a strip mall that housed a window tinting car-and-audio store, a Chinese take-out place, Phat Kutz barber shop and Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. There are a few hot chicken joints around Nashville, but Prince’s has been there since the 1940s, and it’s the original. I placed my order for a chicken breast sandwich, a side of fries and a sweet tea, lifting my voice to be heard over the sound of two TVs, one playing a vintage episode of “The Cosby Show,” the other a soap opera.

“Mild, medium or hot?” the older woman asked me. 

“Hot,” I said.

She peered at me over her glasses and didn’t say a word.

“I love hot,” I said.

“All right, honey,” she said. 

I got a number and sat down at a picnic table to wait for my number to come up. It was then that I noticed that there was an extra-hot option that she didn’t tell me about.

MORE OF THE HEAT SEEKER: Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Video: Alison Stein Wellner—The Heat Seeker

Number 39 was called. I got my plate. It was a bone-in breast and a wing, placed on top of two slices of thick white bread and garnished with dill pickles. There appeared to be only the slightest amount of sauce on this chicken, the heat and the spice soaked in to thick orange crust, surrounding steaming juicy meat. I attacked first with plastic fork and knife but switched to my fingers. In no time, I had a pile of orange napkins around me, and it quickly became apparent that I needed a system to separate the napkins I was using for my fingers from the ones I was using to wipe the tears that were streaming from my eyes, and the ones I was using for my running nose—which wouldn’t be so complicated if my brain hadn’t stopped working.

Because it was melting.

With all due respect to the chile peppers I consumed whole, this hot chicken was the hottest damned thing I’d ever tasted. It starts with a nice heat spreading across your mouth, and then a slight tingle on the lips, and then it creeps down your throat ... and then it really catches fire. It burns and it burns and it never subsides. There are no waves. There is no respite. The heat keeps building even when you think it can’t possibly build for another moment. I stopped eating to take a few notes. This is what I wrote: “pain pain pain.”

I wondered whether I could possibly finish the sandwich, but then my mouth went a little numb, and I kept going. After I finished, my insides felt sunburned. My lips were swollen as though I’d just visited an aggressive plastic surgeon. I finished my lunch and headed straight to Walgreens across the intersection for lip balm, Tums and mints.

It turns out that the lady behind Prince’s counter is the third-generation owner, AndrÃ(c) Jeffries. I didn’t talk to her that day—I could barely make it back to my car—but I later returned to Nashville to discover, first of all, that the Walgreens across the intersection has closed so don’t count on it being there if you go and, second, to learn that the birth of hot chicken is credited to the ingenuity of that which hell hath no fury to match: a woman scorned.

“Now, this is only a rumor,” said AndrÃ(c), as she sat across from me amidst the wreckage of my meal—I ordered medium this time, and it was still plenty hot. “My great uncle, he’s been dead 30-plus years now, but he was a womanizer, OK? A philanderer. And one of his lady friends wanted to take revenge on him for that.”

One night she invited the scoundrel over for dinner and prepared him some fried chicken. But this was no ordinary hot chicken, this was the hottest, meanest, kick-your-man’s-cheating-ass fried chicken she could muster. The plan might have been to actually kill him with it.

“But after he got over the jar of it, he liked it!” said AndrÃ(c), chuckling. “He liked it so much and he started this place. It’s been handed down ever since.”

As to what makes the hot chicken so hot, AndrÃ(c) is circumspect. She will only say that the chicken is marinated, and it marinates all day, so it gets hotter as the day goes on. More seasoning is added after it’s deep fried. The place became known as a late-night dining spot, although the lunch crowd is also brisk, and the clientele is devoted. “I didn’t want to give you hot when you ordered it that first time, because I’d never seen you before,” she said.

It’s fair to say that at Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville, I had reached my own personal heat tolerance limit. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want to eat anything hotter than that. Without getting too indelicate, you don’t only feel the heat going down your throat, you feel it all the way through your system, and I mean all the way. Even so, while my brain did feel like it was melting, it didn’t really feel as though the top of my skull was going to come off. I wondered about my grandfather’s head-clapping reaction at that Chinese restaurant all those years before. Perhaps he was just being overly dramatic? That was the theory I settled on—until I went to, of all places, Indianapolis.

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10 Comments for The Heat Seeker: Into the Heartland

Sarah 05.15.09 | 3:52 PM ET

I really enjoyed these stories. Never been a heat seeker myself, but now I think I’m craving some allyl isothocynate. Great series, Alison.

Christy 05.15.09 | 7:11 PM ET

It’s funny how we so often find what we are looking for in the most unexpected places! The unexpected nature of it, I think, is a lot responsible for the head-clapping reaction no matter what it might be! :-) There is no steeling yourself against the suprise!

One time I was eating at a restaurant in Haiti and a big bowl of a very spicy condiment was sitting on the buffet line. Now it LOOKS like coleslaw BUT it has a very spicy vinegar flavor… This particular hotel always served the “burn all the way down” variety as well… Another American man also dining there walked by and said something like, “Oh! I am going to get some of this coleslaw and loaded his plate with it… I SO wanted to see his reaction when he put a big fork full of it into his mouth! >:-) Unfortunately, he went and sat well out of my view in an inside dining area while I was on the patio…. I think he just might have clapped his hand on his head…! :-) Good series!

Megan Eaves 05.15.09 | 10:12 PM ET

Great end to the series! Unexpected and hilarious - I loved it!

Megan Eaves 05.15.09 | 10:15 PM ET

Great end to the series! Unexpected and hilarious - I love it!

Alison Stein Wellner 05.16.09 | 2:05 PM ET

Thanks everyone! It was a lot of fun to research and write!

Migration Mark 05.16.09 | 10:25 PM ET

I really love hot food.  After bumming around Southeast Asia I don’t think I can eat anything without intense heat.  I find myself always overdoing it with chili, but can’t seem to help myself.  Food without heat no longer has any flavor to me.

Alison Stein Wellner 05.17.09 | 10:05 AM ET

Hi Migration Mark,
There is some question out there about whether spicy food can be physically addictive. Certainly, I think that you can “calibrate” your palate to a level of heat tolerance, so it seems you’ve set your palate to stun!
On the bright side, it’s a great time to live in the United States if you love spicy food. I was just reading about the ubiquity of sriracha sauce: http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/the-united-states-of-sriracha/

Indy Chili-Head 06.10.09 | 4:46 PM ET

Alison,

You must not be a real chili-head or a real lover of hot & spicy food if you found St Elmo’s shrimp cocktail sauce to be a spicy as you’ve described.

i live in Indianapolis, and have eaten St Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail many times.

It’s tasty, for sure, but not all THAT spicy.

Tim Wilson 06.10.09 | 5:31 PM ET

Indy Chili-head is either a dragon or just clueless. I too have lived in Indy all of my life, and nothing i have ever put in my mouth is hotter than the shrimp cocktail at St Elmo. The burning sensation that you get in your nose is like nothing else that i’ve experienced.

Indy Chili-Head 06.18.09 | 8:44 AM ET

Gee, Tim,

You must be a chili wimp.  I’ve had Thai food and Indian curries at several place around the country that were both hotter than the shrimp cocktail sauce at St Elmo’s.  I’ve had habenero chicken wings (at Lafayette Brewing Company) that are hotter.

I’ve had the waiters at St Elmo’s bring me extra cocktail sauce in a dish so I can eat it with a spoon.

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