Community Cookbook: Fried Chicken Wings by Leni Santoro from Brooklyn, New York

Fried chicken wings remind Leni Santoro of childhood and the three years her family spent living in a barn in upstate New York.

She says the house they planned to live in burned down six months after they moved to the remote part of Madison County in New York, where not even the roads and nearby towns were printed on maps. Santoro was 8 years old at the time, and to make their barn livable, she says her family put rugs on the floor and placed cardboard around the walls as insulation.

Winters got cold, really cold. Santoro says she was probably the only 11-year-old with rheumatoid arthritis. Their barn had no plumbing, electricity or heat, but they did have a wood-burning cook stove they used to cook with and heat water for baths.

“There still was no concept of how unusual [living in a barn] was. I thought everybody lived like this,” Santoro says.

“I wasn’t really traumatized by it, is what I’m trying to say. It seemed normal. Growing up and being in my 70s now … I can relate to my friends who are in their 90s. We have similar experiences, because my life was so strange.”

(Left to right) Hanny, Krissy and Leni Santoro stand in front of the barn in upstate New York where they lived for a couple of years after their house burned down. Leni says the road they lived on and closest town were both so remote they did not appear on maps. Photo submitted by Leni Santoro

Despite the difficulties, Santoro still has fond memories of her time there — especially those connected with her mother’s fried chicken wings. Santoro says she would climb into the barn’s silo with her sisters Hanny and Krissy, and then they’d crawl to the hayloft to eat chicken wings and play with dolls together.

She says her family had chickens, goats, dogs and ducks. They got eggs from the chickens and milk from the goats. Other food they might have acquired from welfare, which Santoro says was not a check or cash; instead, a truck would show up and throw food they had to catch at them, such as five-pound bags of flour and sugar, cheese blocks, or cans of peanut butter.

The main recipes Santoro remembers her mother making were scallion pancakes — flour, water and scallions — or fried chicken wings. At the time, Santoro says most people discarded chicken wings, so her mother would visit the local market and get a five-gallon paint bucket filled with wings for free.

Santoro says her mother was an amazing cook; she’d fry the chicken in butter in a cast iron pan over an open fire, something Santoro hasn’t mastered yet; every time she’s tried to fry them in pure butter, the chicken wings burn.

Santoro’s mother, Rose Stufen, did not have an easy life. In 1939, Stufen, 20 years old at the time, and Santoro’s grandmother, Helene Beffert, visited Germany; it was their tradition to put flowers on relatives’ graves there. While at the gravesite, they were apprehended by German officials and taken to Dachau, a concentration camp established by the Nazi government during World War II. Both of them were German, but had immigrated to the United States and were American citizens when this occurred.

Santoro says her grandmother was at Dachau for the entirety of the war, and her mother was moved around to different camps and cities. Eventually, Russian troops liberated their camp, and they were able to return to the United States.

“It is easy for people to think [my mother] made this stuff up,” Santoro says. “She didn’t have the tattoo [from the concentration camp], she had a bad scar, ‘cause when she got out of there, she scraped off the tattoo from her arm and my grandmother’s arm, so my grandmother wouldn’t have to be reminded.”

Leni Santoro stands in the door of the barn in upstate New York where she lived as a child. She says they used cardboard as insulation for the cold winter months. Photo submitted by Leni Santoro

As a child, Santoro says she didn’t believe her mother when she would talk about the Holocaust; it didn’t sound real. But later, Santoro learned about the realities of the war and found ancestry documentation that supported her mother’s stories.

In 1966, Santoro’s family moved from their farm in upstate New York to Brooklyn. Santoro says they lived in a brownstone in the Park Slope neighborhood at one point, where she says she did all sorts of “crazy things” with her sister Krissy, like trying to get lost on the subway or jumping between the roofs of three-story buildings.

Santoro liked school, but she could “never get to school enough.” She says she had straight A’s until the “New Math” curriculum became too difficult in high school. She says she only passed eighth grade because the nuns at her school liked her and allowed her to write five essays about the importance of math instead of taking an actual math test. She quit school at age 16 and went to work at a bank on Wall Street for four years.

“It’s been an interesting life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been interesting,” Santoro says.

She believes everything she’s gone through, from living in poverty as a child to her family’s history and having to leave school at an early age, has helped her to be more empathetic.

“Someone can be homeless on the street … that doesn’t mean they’re deserving of that. It’s just the circumstances of life,” Santoro says. “I wasn’t deserving of growing up in a barn. It was just the circumstances of life.”

Although her mother died when Santoro was 23 years old, she has tried to replicate the fried chicken recipe she has remembered for decades; she thinks she’s gotten pretty close. She made wings for her daughter Lily’s wedding, and she makes them often for her children and grandchildren. Occasionally, she makes them for herself.

Santoro has four children; she loves them dearly. She ended up in Southeast Missouri a couple of years ago because one of her daughters lives here. She also has two grandchildren, and she says it is a completely different feeling from having children.

“When I held my first daughter, I felt like, ‘Wow, I’m not alone in the world, and she’s so beautiful, and this is my daughter,’” Santoro says. “But when I held my grandson, it didn’t feel like that. It felt like I got a little glimpse into the future that I won’t be a part of, but a part of me will. That’s how it felt and with my granddaughter, too. I felt like a part of this crazy family that had chicken wings and everything else happening in their life was still going to be there in the future.”

Fried chicken wings are one of the few recipes Leni Santoro remembers her mother, Rose Stufen, cooking when their family lived in a barn. Santoro has been trying to recreate the recipe for decades.Photo by Jasmine Jones

__Grandma Rose's Fried Chicken Wings__

By Leni Santoro

Modified from the written recipe in “The Santoro Family Cookbook”

20 chicken wings 4 cups flour 3 tablespoons paprika 1 tablespoon meat tenderizer 1 tablespoon basil 1 tablespoon sage 1 tablespoon marjoram 1 tablespoon rosemary leaves 1 tablespoon oregano 1 tablespoon garlic powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper 2 eggs ½ cup water 2 tablespoons butter ¼ cup oil (Leni recommends soybean or sunflower oil)

Remove the tips from the wings, and cut the two sections apart. Set aside. In a large bowl, mix together all of the dry ingredients — flour and spices. In a medium bowl, beat the eggs with the water.

Using a pair of tongs, first dip the chicken wings into the egg mixture, and then roll them in the flour mixture. Continue until all of the wings are coated. Set aside.

In a large frying pan, melt two tablespoons of butter with ¼ cup of oil. Add the chicken and brown in batches.

As each batch is done, remove the wings and place them in a large roasting pan. After all of the chicken has browned, place the pan in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 to 45 minutes, or until chicken begins to separate from the bone.

See Leni make this recipe at The Best Years Facebook page.