“Nashville hot chicken is what best represents the soul of the city, and Rachel Martin describes its storied history. With a crunchy, spicy exterior, and a warm, melting center, it embodies what Nashville is all about.”​
—Maneet Chauhan, James Beard Award–winning chef, TV personality, restaurateur, and author of Chaat
​"This book serves as a comprehensive guide to a great city and to the people who were positively influenced by the very African American culture it sought, so often, to undermine. The delicacy of hot chicken is a thread between two cultures and gives historical perspective to this culinary craze."​
—Carla Hall, chef and author of Carla Hall's Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration
These days, hot chicken is a "must-try" Southern food. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge, and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken "Nashville-style." Thousands of people attend the Music City Hot Chicken Festival each year. The James Beard Foundation has given Prince's Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish.
But for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville's Black neighborhoods--and the story of hot chicken says something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future.
Hot, Hot Chicken recounts the history of Nashville's Black communities through the story of its hot chicken scene from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.
“This is exciting reading filled with nuggets of African American histories of food, taste, labor, economics, race, gender, place, region, community, and so much more. It is at the same time a gastronomic study, memoir, and illumination of perseverance as much as it is about the ways culinary landscapes can be contentious and even triumphant. ... And, it absolutely is a food history that should be read by all!”​
—Psyche Williams-Forson, author of Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power