So what is it about Fried Chicken that makes it Southern?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the tornado.
Though it definitely involves marinating the chicken in buttermilk. Of which the class had none 😢

However I'd like to extend my sympathy to Teacher Paul, who's dealing with family illnesses at the moment and so might not be bringing the class his A game.
Or his buttermilk.

The Southern aspect of Southern Fried Chicken is, of course, the Southern states of the United States - particularly Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas and perhaps most famously, Kentucky. This is characterised by chicken joints marinated in buttermilk before being dredged with seasoned flour and shallow or deep-fried.

Any investigation of the origins of this form of chicken will inevitably yield two supposed sources - Africa and Scotland.
The claim will be made that Scots are famous deep fat fryers who influenced the cuisine of the Southern states to which they emigrated. The trouble is that whilst Scots are indeed notoriously fry-happy, even going so far as to batter and fry Mars bars, this is the modern Scot. The Scots of yesteryear who migrated to America in the mid 1700s were famous for boiling everything: Porridge. Turnips. Haggis. They almost certainly didn't even have access to the quantities of fat required to deep-fry all their food off in the barren Northern wastelands of the pre-Enlightened Scottish Highlands.
All of the Scotch recipes in the oft-referenced 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, including one for Scotch Chickens, involve only boiling or shallow-frying in butter.
Moreover, the insular Scots (and the Irish) mostly settled up in the mountains as far away as possible from everyone else, and a long way from the coastal and tidewater lowlands where fried chicken was already being developed before they'd even arrived.

Back home, however, those Africans shipped across the Atlantic as slaves, would have had use of coconut oil, olive oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, palm oil, and hair oil in their cooking. OK, perhaps not the hair oil.
Heavy seasonings, battered fritters and deep-fat frying in general are now and probably were then widespread throughout West Africa.
It seems most likely to me that Southern Fried Chicken has more African roots than Scottish.

Teacher Paul demonstrated a new (to me) and exciting chicken jointing technique in which the breasts are cut in half along the length of the chicken while still attached to the skeleton. À la KFC!
Here is the process, which yields eight portions conveniently dividing equally between white and dark pieces - two breasts, two supremes, two thighs and two drumsticks:

• Remove the wishbone and free the oysters.
  These are optional steps - cut around the triangular V of the wishbone to more easily pull it out, and with the chicken breast-side down cut across the oysters at the top of the thigh so they will remain attached to the leg joints when they are removed.
• With the chicken breast-side up, cut around the base of the leg, force open the joint with the chicken's hips and cut the leg free.
• Separate the thigh from the drumstick by cutting through the knee joint.
• With the chicken breast-side up, neck towards you, place the first joint of your thumb on the chicken's breast-bone and holding the skin taut, cut lengthways down through the breast at the tip of your thumb.
  This will release a half-breast supreme with the wings still attached.
• Remove the two end wing bones, cutting at the second joint to leave only the first bone attached to the breast.
• Repeat on the other side.
• With the carcass standing neck downmost, chop quickly down close along the breastbone to separate the ribs. Continue cutting to release the entire breastbone with two half-breasts still attached on either side.
• Cut across the breastbone to create two bone-in breast pieces.

Teacher Paul then proceeded to show us how to finish the chicken pieces in the manner of a professional kitchen by removing the joint ends from the protruding bones with a sharp blow to the back of the knife, pulling out all dangling sinews, (an awkward and messy process) and scraping back the flesh from the bone ends to neaten them up.
Paul referred to this latter process as chining, but I fear he may be confused:
Rib-roasts of meat, especially beef but also lamb, are often served with the backbone (known as the chine) separated from the ribs to make carving easier. This is called chining.
Scraping back the flesh and sinew from the ends of bones to give them a cleaner, whiter look, particular when roasting, is called Frenching.

This week's PaulPointers™

• Dress coleslaw with a vinaigrette before adding mayonnaise for extra zing.
• Supermarkets are evil masters, and force their suppliers to dance to their arbitrary tunes. Even to the point of wasting perfectly good produce if it doesn't meet their standards.
• Now is the best time to buy Spring Lamb, paradoxically. Actually born in the spring, they've only now had time to graze in the pastures and put a bit of meat on.
• Paul is not a big fan of cheese graters except perhaps for cheese. You should shred your coleslaw ingredients with a knife, like an axe murderer. Or, well, a knife murderer.