The Heat Seeker: Into the Heartland

05.15.09 | 10:59 AM ET

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.

Believe me, when I went to Indy to watch the 500, I never thought my little side heat-seeking project would come into play. In fact, it was the last thing on my mind the night before the race when I dined at Harry and Izzy’s, the next-door expansion of the venerable St. Elmo’s Steak House, in downtown Indianapolis.

I ordered a meal that couldn’t be more ordinary: salad, steak and a shrimp cocktail to start. The menu said it was “St. Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail,” but that distinction was meaningless to me.

Most shrimp cocktails are served with pink shrimp primly draped over the edge of a glass or a serving dish, and a dollop of cocktail sauce in the middle. For the St. Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail, the shrimp swoon all over themselves and are slathered in a thick cocktail sauce. A fork on the side of the bowl spears a lemon, saltines were scattered around the saucer. I squeezed the lemon, seized my knife and, in the middle of a sentence, popped some shrimp into my mouth.

I dropped my cutlery as a sensation that I can only describe as what electrocution must feel like shot down my throat and then up my nose, forking its way into my brain. My hands started to rise and—yes!—I had the urge to clap my hands on my skull to keep the top from blowing off. My hands shot up in the air, my eyes started to water.

And then it was done. As my hands went back onto the table to liberate a saltine from its wrapper, I looked at this seemingly innocent shrimp cocktail, in the middle of downtown Indianapolis, with new respect. And I made a mental apology to my grandfather, who had not been overly dramatic after all.

I have to admit, though, I was puzzled by Indianapolis’ come-from-nowhere triumph in the blow-the-top-of-my-head-off quest—I mean, really, Indianapolis and not India? Not China, Honduras, Louisiana or Tennessee?

There’s actually a fairly simple explanation, and I found it, once again, in The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible, by Dave DeWitt and Barbara Gerlach. It turns out that food gets heat from only a few ingredients: ginger, wasabi, horseradish, black peppers, chile peppers and mustard seeds. Most of these plants are unrelated to one another.

But two of these plants are closely related botanically: black mustard and horseradish. Both find their heat from a compound called allyl isothocynate, “a pungent aroma and flavor that goes to the back of the throat and attacks the nasal membranes,” write DeWitt and Gerlach.

Black mustard is what’s used most often in Chinese mustard—which my grandfather absentmindedly dipped his egg roll in all those years ago. And horseradish—fresh horseradish, 20 pounds grated fresh daily and sealed in plastic to keep the fumes from knocking out the kitchen staff—that’s what delivers the punch in St. Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail.

Separated by decades, miles and types of cuisine, my grandfather and I each had our unexpectedly intense confrontations with allyl isothocynate. It must be a family trait to believe that when confronted with this substance, we will be able to keep our skulls firmly moored by smacking our scalps hard enough. Indianapolis was probably the last place I would have imagined that I’d learn about a family quirk—and, certainly, that my global quest for the hottest food I could tolerate would come to an end. But so it was, nonetheless.

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