04/14/2026
It isn't Thursday but its a throwback.
I HIGHLY recommend trying this chicken recipe, its like no fried chicken you have ever had.
I would like to take the time today to honor and consider Captain William Dominick Matthews.
Born a free man in Maryland, Matthews moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1856. Where he opened the Waverly House, which served as a stage on the Underground Railroad.
Matthews was superintendent of contrabands for the Kansas Emancipation League, smuggling, horses, riding tack and ammunition to groups like the Seward Brethren.
Matthews recieved a commission with the Kansas Militia and later he became one of the first black officers in the Union Army, where he was commissioned to raise a company for the 1st Kansas Infantry comprised of "colored volunteers," a task which he set about swiftly by making the move to Fort Scott, Kansas to recruit mostly escaped Missouri slaves, many of which he had helped to usher into freedom even though doing so was illegal and punishable by hanging.
Matthews formed the first all collored artillery battery in Fort Scott and the battery were in Fort Scott during Price's Raid, and local commander Colonel Charles W. Blair put Matthews in charge of enrolling "all able bodied colored men in Bourbon County" and assembling them at the fort to defend them from Price.
He served to defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Island Mound, 29 Oct 1862. This skirmish was the first time a regiment of black troops saw combat in the Civil War and occurred five months before the famous 54th Infantry conflict at the Battle of Fort Wagner, in South Carolina (as seen somewhat inaccurately in the movie Glory). Matthews was one of three black artillery officers in the entire Union army.
He is pictured here with a pair of custom Re*****on Model 1858 "New Army" pistols in .44 caliber.
Now what does Captain Mathews have to do with cooking? Or anything really?
Well, a while back I came across a few pages from a July, 1901 printing of the "Kiowa Street Episcopal Church Home Cooking Book" from Lawrence, Ks and among the dozen and a half cheaply printed pages of what i have to assume was a VERY limited printing of a small church cookbook, probably as a part of a fundraiser, i came across this VERY interesting chicken recipe:
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"Ole' Bill's Mamma's Chicken"
Preparing
About a cup of malt vinegar (cider vinegar also works)
A couple of bay leaves
1tsp of salt
1tsp of pepper
pinch of ground clove
1/2 cup chopped winter onions (greens)
Mix in a bowl, add your chicken pieces and let sit there for three hours in the cool.
Battering
1 1/2 cup white bread flour
1 cup to a 1 pint of dry pear or grape wine
Yolk of 4 eggs
1tsp of salt
Mix up the flour with the wine in a bowl until its thinner than pancake batter. Put in the egg yolks and salt to the bowl. Mix well, and feel free to add more wine.
Frying
In a deep pot heat your lard until crackling then take your pieces of chicken from the vinegar, cover them in batter, then put them in the oil without splashing.
Billy says to fry the chicken batches until the outside is crispy and brown.
"Its good and his men liked it too"
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So, i discovered William Mathews for the first time yesterday while researching this recipe, more so, the recipe book.
What i initially found was that the church which printed this cookbook is the church where William Mathews was a member and where his funeral was held when he died in 1909.
This led me to read about him a bit before moving on to research the specific chicken recipe a bit more.
From what i can gather, this style of fried chicken, with the marinade and wine batter, is a distinctly colonial style common in New England from settlement through the 1840s but slowly falling out of favor around the civil war and disappearing entirely from the American culinary tradition with the Irish and Scottish influx of the 1860s-1890s.
It is a DISTINCTLY colonial recipe and uses French Peasantry methodology which differs greatly from the traditional southern "dredge-wash-dredge" method brought north by former slaves but initially introduced by first wave Scotch immigrants to the Appalachian mountains
So whoever Ole' Bill at the Kiowa Street Episcopal church was, we know these things:
He was a He (the author uses the pronoun "his" in "his men.")
He was likely a black man (The only Episcopla church on Kiowa street in Lawrence, Ks in 1901 was the Kiowa Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.)
Older in age (to be given the moniker "Ole' Bill.)
He was in charge of men at some point in his life ("his men liked it too" implies that he had -past tense to like*ed- men)
And "Bill's Mamma" made New England Colonial fried chicken the sort common to Maryland in the 1830s when William Dominick Matthews was just a boy.
I want to be clear, I have absolutely no proof that this recipe was that of THE Captain William Dominick Matthews.
These are at best assumptions that could likely be picked apart by any historian.
Heck, without an address on the pamphlet, i cant even be sure it is the same Kiowa Street Episcopal Church (how many can there be?)
But something in me just loves the idea of Ole' Bill, still rocking that moustach, white with age, half deaf from cannon fire, his re*****on hand cannons hanging on the wall, doddling around his kitchen in Lawrence making his Mamma's chicken for a church picnic on the 4th of july where little boys ran and played in the Freedom of the sun...
Smiling because he knew how precious the day really was...
Have a blessed day folks, get some sun and remember that God made us all Free Men and no matter what Caesar says or does, we are free to taste that freedom in our souls just as surely as we are free to smile on a sunny day or share the memory of our mother's fried chicken.
And thanks to men like Captain William Dominick Matthews, we will all be free, always.
