The ancient BBQ chicken shacks of Delaware, and a secret recipe tied to chicken nuggets

They come from thousands of miles away, lured by chicken and the rumor of smoke.

In the strip between two fast-moving directions of Sussex Highway in Greenwood — 30 miles west of the beaches in Lewes and Rehoboth — the line of the chicken-hungry begins at 8 a.m. and it ends only when the chicken runs out.

There, ballcapped men from the Greenwood Volunteer Fire Company lean over steam and smoke in blistering heat to grill as many as a thousand half-birds each day.

For more than 60 years, this is how chicken has been made in southern Delaware and the Eastern Shore, a tradition so ingrained that News Journal food writer Patricia Talorico has called it “a way of life.”

Each chicken is flattened into king-sized, steel turning racks suspended over a canyon of hot charcoal, and basted with a “secret” vinegar sauce made with oil and egg and laced with more herbs than a witch’s garden. A half-chicken, or three dark-meat quarters, might run you $10 with a roll and some pickles.

On weekends in summer, said firefighter Ryan Boyce, most callers to Greenwood's firehouse aren’t even calling about a fire. They’re calling about smoke.

“People call from Florida and schedule their vacations around this chicken,” said Boyce, who runs Greenwood’s chicken pit Saturdays and Sundays from May to Labor Day. “They call all day long at the firehouse; it's ridiculous. Picking up the phone, you can say, ‘Chicken’s ready’ or ‘Chicken’s sold out’. You don't have to wait for them to say nothing.”

Go: Where to find Delmarva-style chicken barbecue in Southern Delaware – or at a chicken fest

100-year anniversary for Delaware chicken

This year marks the 100-year anniversary since farmer Cecile Steele accidentally kickstarted Delmarva’s poultry industry by ordering too many chickens and having to sell them for meat — or so the legend goes.

And for most of that time, this chicken has been a constant, made by community clubs in southern Delaware and down the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia.

The Kiwanis club has cooked it this way in Bridgeville, six miles from Greenwood, each summer since the 1950s. For more than 50 years, the VFW Post 7234 Chicken Shack has stood sentinel in front of the Bethany Beach National Guard outpost.

And for the chicken industry's centennial, the chicken also will be made this way at a revived Delmarva Chicken Festival, held on Saturday, Oct. 7, in Salisbury, Maryland.

What's so special about Delmarva chicken?

The key to Delmarva-style chicken barbecue is not smoke. It is sauce. And it is diligence. The chicken must stay moist, and so it is never left alone for long. Using brushes more familiar from masonry or housepainting, pitmen baste each chicken with a vinegar-based sauce that is different at each place, but shares a common legacy.

And yet even most of those who grill it don’t know where the recipe began, or why each chicken shack is busy playing variations on a theme — a Maryland or Delaware chicken’s version of jazz.

When you ask, each pit-tender will tell you the sauce has been handed down for generations. And that it’s never been changed.

“Maybe someone borrowed it from North Carolina back in the 1950s,” mused Tom Carey of the Bridgeville Kiwanis club. In Greenwood, Boyce figured someone at the firehouse must have figured out the recipe.

But the sauce and technique, it turns out, go all the way back to the beginnings of the chicken industry in America — and to the man who invented the chicken nugget.

Invention of Delmarva’s chicken barbecue began in New York. Or maybe Pennsylvania

The most-loved chicken barbecue sauce of the Eastern Shore appears to have been an import.

“It derived from a recipe that was developed at Cornell University,” said Connie Parvis.

Perhaps better than anyone else now living, she would know. For more than 40 years beginning in 1972, Parvis presided over the Delmarva Chicken Festival in Delaware and Maryland, bringing that recipe to cooks in various towns.

That chicken festival, which traveled from town to chicken-growing town in Delaware and Maryland, was founded in 1948 to promote what was then still a fairly novel practice: buying, cooking and eating chicken you didn’t raise yourself.

Before the beginnings of the Delmarva poultry industry in 1923, farmers mostly raised chickens for eggs, said Holly Porter at the Delmarva Chicken Association. Buying chicken meat was expensive compared with beef or pork, or fish that were then still plentiful in the Delaware River.

Fried chicken was a celebration that might involve killing your own livestock or finding a chicken too old to breed.

But once Delaware farmer Cecile Steele demonstrated you could make good money selling chicken meat to hotels and restaurants in northern cities like Philadelphia and New York, a cottage industry was born. A fast-growing industry that wanted to convince America to cook more chicken meat.

A festival to celebrate chicken

Enter the Delmarva Chicken Festival, complete with beauty queens, a 10-foot-wide frying pan billed as the largest in the world, and a chicken cooking contest that became famous across the nation.

The people who came to this festival had to eat, of course. The town that held the festival each year would line up teams of volunteers to grill chicken over a charcoal pit.

The association furnished a recipe to work from, Parvis said: a distinctive basting sauce made with vinegar, oil, egg, poultry seasoning, salt and pepper, cooked over a charcoal pit.

The recipe didn’t come from Delaware, however. It arrived in the First State, Parvis believes, via the Delmarva Chicken Association’s first director, University of Delaware extension agent J. Frank Gordy.

Gordy was a well-connected academic in the rising chicken industry. There’s little chance he wouldn’t have known a man sometimes called the George Washington Carver of chicken, Robert C. Baker, Parvis said.

At Cornell University, Baker was an inventive evangelist for poultry, deriving use after use for American birds: turkey burgers, chicken hot dogs, chicken de-boning machines and a technique for breading processed chicken that many believe formed the basis for McDonald’s chicken nuggets.

While at Penn State in the 1940s, Baker also devised a recipe and technique for grilling chicken over a charcoal pit. At Cornell, he began to publicize it with a detailed instruction pamphlet. That recipe is now beloved all over New York as "Cornell chicken."

The recipe also changed chicken forever on the Eastern Shore.

Delmarva chicken barbecue recipes she found before 1950 had no egg and no olive oil, said Maryland historical recipe expert Kara Mae Harris, author of the Old Line Plate blog and a forthcoming book, “Festive Maryland Recipes: Holiday Traditions from the Old Line State.”

The winning chicken barbecue recipe from the chicken festival’s 1949 cooking contest involved ketchup and lemon juice, her records show.

But by the 1960s, when Delmarva’s chicken shacks began smoking, the fundamental character of chicken barbecue seems to have changed on the peninsula. Later community cookbooks on the Eastern Shore show recipes similar to Cornell chicken. So does a 1964 recipe for “Eastern Sho’ Bar-B-Q Chicken'’ by Maryland first lady Helen Avalynn Tawes.

Vinegar. Oil. Egg. Poultry seasoning. Salt. Pepper. The formula that funded a hundred firehouses.Perhaps showing her roots near the Eastern Shore's most southern tip, Tawes also adds her own additions: a little Tabasco and a touch of paprika.

Chicken shacks of Delmarva and dawn of the secret recipe

But a funny thing happened to barbecue chicken when it got to Delaware. It got individual.

In upstate New York, present-day chicken shacks often treat Baker’s Cornell recipe as local religion: a bestselling book everyone reads from.

In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a similar firehouse chicken recipe — with the additions of lemon juice and garlic, and a very Virginian preference for peanut oil — is known and preserved as “Dave Shirkey’s chicken,” after the well-loved man who popularized it there.

But each community chicken shack in Delaware and Maryland seems to make chicken its way. Some use egg. Some leave it out. Some like spice; some don't.

In part, this happened because the Delmarva Chicken Festival moved from town to town, Parvis said. Each crew received the recipe as guidance, but also had its own ideas.

“And it was always a different group of people that was doing the barbecue, and many of them had their own recipe,'' Parvis said.

To this day, each decades-old chicken shack keeps its recipe a guarded secret.

This has inspired loyalty that can span generations. Like sturgeon returning to its native river, each customer and family returns to the chicken shack where they first fell in love.

“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” said Dawn Perry, dining with her husband and son at the Greenwood shack. “It’s definitely the sauce.”

For 15 years without fail, the Perrys have stopped by the Greenwood chicken shack, and only the Greenwood shack, after driving from their home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It's a sauce they've been unable to replicate at home, said husband Bill Perry.

Indeed, Greenwood's is an uncommonly peppy and herbal version, brimming with greenery.

Six miles down the road each weekend, the busy Kiwanis in Bridgeville have their own special vinegar sauce, eschewing oil and egg for butter — the same way some firehouses in North Carolina cook their own pulled-chicken barbecue.

The Kiwanis also have another trick up their sleeve.

“The magic happens in the cooler,” said pitmaster Carey. After coming off the grill, the chicken gets one more blast of sauce before steaming in a foil-lined cooler for hours.

“That steam makes it fall apart," he said. "Makes it tender and juicy.”

As for the VFW chicken shack in Bethany Beach? Pitmaster and Korean War veteran Ken Weber says veterans who’ve served in every war from the past century have been cooking with the same vinegar-oil-egg basting sauce for 60 years.

But they, too, have a secret ingredient, “some other marination” that makes their chicken especially tender and moist.

Will chicken tradition die out?

If there aren’t as many chicken shacks on the peninsula as there used to be, it’s not for lack of demand: Each shack serves up anywhere from 500 to 1,000 plates a day.

Just as in Greenwood or Bridgeville, said Weber, people plan their vacations around the chicken at the Guard outpost.

“I've talked to any number of visitors every summer who plan their vacation so they can get here on Saturday to buy their chicken for that week,” he said. “And then they plan their departure on Saturday to buy chicken before they go home.”

But some nearby chicken cooks have retired. At others, it can be hard to find enough people to cook.

The Greenwood shack had to stop serving chicken on Fridays last year, trimming to Saturday and Sunday only. It became too hard to find enough volunteers to cook, Boyce said.

Kiwanis' Carey says he has nightmares about the Bridgeville chicken shack not passing to a new generation. Not just because of the local community organizations the chicken money supports — but because of how the chicken draws the area together.

The chicken festival was stopped in 2014 for similar reasons, said chicken association director Porter, and the 100th anniversary of Delmarva chicken is the last Delmarva Chicken Festival the association has planned.

Her association no longer has to convince America to eat more chicken, she said. Mission accomplished. And volunteers to staff the festival and cook the chicken are in much shorter supply.

But in 2023, for the 100th anniversary, the Delmarva Chicken Festival will name a Delmarva Chicken beauty queen. A 5-foot frying pan will fill with chicken. And a charcoal pit will grill it.

And every weekend from May till Labor Day, the chicken shacks will still smoke in Sussex County and Maryland just as they have for 60 years. That is, as long as there are still people to cook it

“It takes a lot of people to put this all together,” said Weber at the Bethany Beach shack. “Like Frank Perdue used to say, 'It takes tough guys to make tender chicken.'”

Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based writer for USA Today Network.

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: The history of Delmarva-style BBQ chicken in Delaware and Maryland