Tips For Hunting Chicago’s Long-lost Recipes

The city’s top recipe sleuths share their secrets as we recreate a divine, but elusive, fried chicken dish.

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Katherine Nagasawa / WBEZ
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Katherine Nagasawa / WBEZ

Tips For Hunting Chicago’s Long-lost Recipes

The city’s top recipe sleuths share their secrets as we recreate a divine, but elusive, fried chicken dish.

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Even if you’re not a big foodie, you’ve probably got a dish that holds special meaning for you — a food that can instantly transport you to a time and place when things were rosier, simpler or just more delicious. 

Now, imagine losing that dish forever.

That’s what happened to Nancy Rosman when Mandis the Chicken King closed in the early 1970s. The restaurant had operated in the Portage Park neighborhood at Montrose and Central since the 1940s, and it served up a fried chicken so special that Nancy remains haunted by it today.

“It was French fried chicken, but it didn’t taste particularly greasy,” she recalled. “It was very crunchy, but light and just really fantastic. I’ve tasted a lot of fried chicken and nothing has ever been like this.”

Nancy has searched for the recipe — mostly through online message boards — for more than a decade, with no luck. So, like Princess Leia dropping a message into R2D2’s memory bank, she dropped a message into the Curious City question bank for help.

She asked if we could find the Mandis recipe but also reveal recipes from other long gone Chicago culinary institutions.

We agreed to take up the fried chicken challenge, with help from our partners at the Chicago Tribune. But instead of just tracking down a slew of other Chicago dishes, we’ve created a handy guide, to help you with your own recipe hunting. (To mutilate an old saying: Give a reader a fish recipe and you feed him for a day; teach a reader to fish for recipes and you feed him for life.)

To assemble this guide we talked to a couple of pros, writers who’ve been recipe sleuthing for many years. They’re Tribune food writer Bill Daley, and Monica Kass-Rogers, who writes a blog called Lost Recipes Found, after a series of columns on the subject she did for the Chicago Tribune.

Both have been amazed by Chicago’s appetite for elusive old restaurant recipes.

“There’s a huge nostalgia for long ago restaurants,” Daley said. “People want to remember an important dish or an important meal. There’s a lot of that from Chicago readers.” Kass-Rogers remembered when she first put out a call for lost recipes.

“We were inundated with hundreds and hundreds of requests,” she said. And a whole category of those recipes was for defunct restaurant dishes.

Here are shortcuts, skills, insider tips and theories they’ve developed over the years. I’ll present them here as I go about trying to zero in on the secrets to the magic of Mandis Chicken King.

Tip 1: Make sure you have the right name, address and time period for the place that served the long-lost recipe

This was our first challenge. Nancy recalled the restaurant name as “Mandas.” But after searching archives using different variations on the name, we discovered it’s actually Mandis, and that made the research a lot easier. Daley said he’s seen this a lot.

“You’d be surprised at how often the initial information is wrong,” said Daley. “People’s memories can be very hazy.”

Tip 2: Dig into newspaper archives

Daley noted that you can often get clues from ads, stories about the restaurant and, sometimes, the big prize: a complete recipe that the paper already published.

If you have a Chicago Public Library account, you can access a number of archival newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times — for free.

Ads for Mandis’ milk-fed spring chicken appeared regularly in Chicago newspapers. (Courtesy of Northwest Chicago Historical Society)

Tip 3: Search for old employees or those still connected to the place

Unfortunately, both owners — Bill Mandis and Nick Doukas — have since passed away. I did, however, find a Tribune article and later a RedEye piece indicating that Chris Liakouras, the co-founder of Chicago’s Parthenon restaurant, had served as a waiter at Mandis when he first came here from Greece in 1960. Unfortunately, he didn’t remember much.

Max Pars, who took over the Mandis space with his restaurant Pars Cove in the early ‘70s, recalled a little more.

“It was a half chicken with coleslaw and fries,” he said between filling orders at his Pars Cove restaurant, now located in Lincoln Park. “Some Sundays I would get 150 orders for it. People from downtown would order and they would come and pick it up. It was good fried chicken.”

Pars says he continued to serve the chicken after he took over the building with his Persian restaurant — mostly because customers kept asking for it. But within a year, he said, he was told by the previous owners’ family he had to stop.

Hmmmm.

Tip 4: Track down the owner’s next of kin

Since the two original owners had passed away, I reached out to the Mandis and Doukas kids listed in obituaries—or at least people with their same names. Most of these emails, calls and Facebook messages struck out.

Still, Daley said they’ve often been good sources of information for him, noting “a lot of times the kids are really excited to talk about it and share those old memories.”

I did hear from a Mandis daughter, who told me that the recipe “died with my dad.” And one Doukas brother — when I called him at his job in the Chicago suburbs — seemed a little perturbed by my call. He hinted that he had the recipe but didn’t want to share it. Instead, he offered two ingredients: “flour and water.” This, at least, told me it was a battered chicken, but I was still miles away from a recipe.

Ugh.

Then, a week later, just when I thought I’d hit a brick wall, I got an email back from another Doukas brother, Ted. He agreed to chat on the phone.

“I basically grew up in the restaurant,” said Ted, who works in international investments. “We lived just a couple of blocks away and I worked there when I was in school.”

He confirmed that the recipe exists, but it’s “still pretty much a family secret.”

“When we had the restaurant, there were several people who wanted to buy the recipe and were willing to pay money,” he explained. “But my father and uncle didn’t want anything to do with that.”

No matter how much I begged, Ted wouldn’t give up the recipe. But he did offer crumbs.

“It’s not a complicated recipe,” he said. “There are a couple of things they did differently from what other people who made fried chicken would do. … One thing I will tell you — and keep in mind the restaurant started in the 1940s — we did not use vegetable oil. It was all cooked in lard. That is one of the things when people try to think about how it tasted, that helped create a unique flavor to the chicken.”

Ted wouldn’t tell me anything about the spices, but he did confirm his brother’s hint about the batter. He further told me where they got their chickens: from a purveyor still operating in Chicago today, Cougle Commission Co.

Tip 5: Consider what the ingredients were like at the time

So, what would those milk-fed spring chickens have been like at the time?

I called the Cougle Commission Company and talked to president Lee Friedheim. He told me that they don’t sell milk-fed spring chickens today, but it probably doesn’t matter.

“Spring chicken just meant a tender, young chicken,” said Friedheim, who thinks he even delivered chickens to Mandis the Chicken King in his teens. “The chickens I delivered were just regular three-pounders. And today chickens are ready so soon (about 39 days), that all of them are like spring chickens.”

This point was important, because if you are trying to recreate a long-lost flavor ingredient quality matters, Daley reminded me.

“Things change,” he said. “I mean, would you say that today’s milk has the same quality and flavor and texture that it did in 1950 or ‘70s? No.”

The same goes for lard. Today most of our lard is made with hydrogenated, factory-farmed hog fat from industrial breeds. But back during the Mandis heyday, it would have likely come from fatter, heritage breeds that lived outdoors — and would probably not have been hydrogenated. I tracked down two tubs of such old-fashioned lard made from the fat of Berkshire hogs raised outdoors at Faith’s Farm in Kankakee County.

Lard from heritage pigs who live outdoors is hard to find these days, but was much more common when Nancy first tried Mandis chicken. (WBEZ/Monica Eng)

Tip 6: Cultivate anonymous sources

I can’t tell you much about this tip except that sometimes — if you advertise through social media that you are looking for something — a source will come out of the woodwork with information that can’t be attributed. That was the case for one of our sources who didn’t know the complete recipe, but said he/she believed the chicken was first washed and soaked in vinegar and water, then dipped in a batter that contained sour cream and sat overnight.

The vinegar is a traditional method in some areas of the South and the Caribbean. There, folks use it to clean the chicken and get rid of any “funk.” But the sour cream was a new one for me. We consulted with Chicago’s legendary cook, author and restaurateur Ina Pinkney. She’d never heard of a sour cream batter that sat overnight.

We soaked the chicken in a bath of half vinegar and half water before dipping it in a batter that combined the lightness of cornstarch with the fermented quality of sour cream. (WBEZ/Katherine Nagasawa)

“And the thing that worries me is if it was in the fridge it would just stay the same, like buttermilk,” Pinkney said. “But if you let it sit on the counter fermenting all night and it gets fluffy, then what? I can’t imagine what you would do with it.”

Tip 7: Fill in the gaps

“If you can’t get the exact one, you can try to create a facsimile of one thereof,” Kass Rogers said.

“You can often piece something together based on existing recipes from the period and as many clues as you can use to tweak it.,” Daley offered.

This is what we did with the final recipes we tested and presented to Nancy.

But would it work?

After a few hours of consulting with Tribune food editor Joe Gray and recipe tester Lisa Schumacher, we started with the smallest — almost 3-pound chickens — we could find. We soaked them in vinegar and water, which gave them a clean feel and slightly tangy flavor. We made a batter with cornstarch, sour cream and baking soda that sat on the counter overnight, getting bubbly. We then came up with a plan to try five different variations of ingredients and dredge-and-dip methods. And we cooked the chicken in lard.

(For the full recipe, click here)

The next day we invited Nancy Rosman to the Chicago Tribune test kitchen, asking her to eat a few preliminary rounds before digging into the final version.

“This looks like a very crackly piece of chicken,” she said. “The crust looks like you have a lot of places where you could pick it off. It smells very good and looks like it’s inviting you to take a bite.”

She crunched. She chewed. She opined.

“This is very good fried chicken,” she announced. “In terms of the elements I remember, you’ve gotten very close. But if you had that exact fried chicken now, I think I could pick it out from this. People who had eaten at Mandis, might not say that this is exactly like Mandis, but it’s pretty darn close and definitely worth making.”

Nancy Rosman tasted five versions of the recipe before we made the final batch that followed all of the clues we were given. (WBEZ/Katherine Nagasawa)

This is when I remembered yet another tip that both Daley and Kass-Rogers offered.

Tip 8: Be prepared for disappointment because, sometimes to capture the exact flavor, you just had to be there

“Sometimes the recipe takes on this aura that it was much more delicious than it really was,” Daley said. “And when you’re a kid, your taste buds are one way and they can be different when you are 50 and sometimes memories burnish the palate.”

Kass-Rogers agreed that often the dishes people are looking for are more about recapturing, “a specific event and people who were sitting around a table.”

“Then,” she said, “everything about that meal shines in the golden glow of memory, including that dish.”

Nancy is well aware of this.

“Part is the ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ factor. I tend to romanticize things that are no longer there,” she said. “But as you get older you start to treasure some of the things you lost, whether they’re food, recipes or people you associate with special tastes. I associate the recipe with a special bond with my dad and with my family and with our offbeat adventures. But there was something about it that will never be as good as anything else. … The fact that it came from a neighborhood joint and you could afford it and it was something you would never do at home.”

So, a word of warning to recipe sleuths: Even if you find the exact recipe, the dish may never taste the same, because the real magic was in the overall experience.

Other tips from Kass-Rogers and Daley:

  • Publish unfinished, wrong recipes to draw out the readers who will write in to correct you. This formerly would’ve been hard for non-journalists to do, but these days anyone with Internet access can post something on a forum where potential “correctors” will read it.

  • If the recipe comes from a suburban restaurant, check that suburb’s historical society for old community cookbooks or archives of local dishes.

  • Talk to the Culinary Historians of Chicago. Kass-Rogers said “A lot of these folks used to be the people who wrote the food columns in the city and if they don’t know the recipe they might know someone who knows someone.”

  • If you can’t get the actual recipe, consider a recipe from that region and era. “I have hundreds of cookbooks in my home categorized by region and era for that reason,” said Kass-Rogers.

Popular Chicago recipes unearthed!

For Chicago recipe hounds who don’t want to do all the sleuthing themselves, here 10 of the most popular Chicago recipes Bill Daley and Monica Kass-Rogers have unearthed.

More about our question-asker

Part of the appeal of the Mandis chicken recipe for Nancy Rosman was its association with her dad and the cool places he’d find while traveling city as a refrigerator repairman. (Courtesy of Nancy Rosman)

Nancy Rosman is a native Chicagoan who grew up in the Albany Park neighborhood.

She was glad to hear that Curious City and the Chicago Tribune had taken up the search for one of her favorite childhood dishes — and excited to hear about others who’d remembered the chicken, too.

Although her family would occasionally venture out of her neighborhood for a treat, like the Mandis Chicken in Portage Park, Nancy spent most of her ‘60s childhood in Albany Park.

“At that time, it was largely Jewish, the kind of place where you did all your shopping on Lawrence Avenue, and you knew all the people,” she said. “Kids would go out in the morning, and at dinnertime mothers would call out the window for them to come home.”

But Rosman’s father, Bernard Pearlstein, did regularly venture out of the neighborhood for his job. And, he’d come back with some great food finds.

“My dad fixed refrigerators and washing machines for a living,” Nancy recalled. “So he routinely went all over the city, and he knew places that some people would see as a dive but others thought were a treasure. We never had a lot of money and so it was a huge treat for him to take us to places he’d discovered. It was so fun.”

Today, Nancy is a semi-retired psychiatric social worker living in the northern suburbs, where she enjoys friends, family and the memories of nostalgic meals gone by.

Monica Eng is a WBEZ food and health reporter. Follow her at @monicaeng