During the 1996 Summer Olympics, when the world's fascination with all things Southern peaked, a reporter from BBC World radio asked me, a sometime food writer, to talk about the region's cooking.

We met at Thelma's Kitchen, then across from the swimming venue at Georgia Tech. No sooner had I lifted drumstick to mouth than he stuck a microphone in front of me and inquired, in a plummy British accent: "So where did Southern fried chicken come from?"

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The first reference to fried chicken to appear in The Atlanta Constitution, on April 22, 1871.

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The first fried-chicken recipe didn't appear until 1824 in 'The Virginia Housewife,' a cookbook by Mary Randolph, a boardinghouse operator who was related to Thomas Jefferson.

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I forget what I said — something coherent, I hope — but what I was thinking was: Uh ... hmmm ... could we go to the next question?

So where did it come from? And what's so Southern about it anyway?

These are loaded questions, it turns out.

Different sources offer different theories. John Mariani, in "The Encyclopedia of Food and Drink," traces fried chicken to Scotland — a notion other culinary historians discount. John Egerton, in "The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture," credits African cooking techniques. Damon Lee Fowler, author of "Fried Chicken," says early versions also showed up in 18th-century British cookbooks.

Fowler mentioned the European connection at one of the first symposiums held by the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. He touched off a discussion that grew so heated one observer joked that she thought someone was going to pull out a pistol. Some people were offended, thinking he downplayed the contributions of Africans.

SFA director John T. Edge takes a middle path. He believes fried chicken came from multiple sources but didn't become recognizably Southern until slave cooks started fiddling with it.

"Everyone wants a pat answer about where these dishes come from, but there isn't one," he says. "There is no smoking skillet."

The second question — fried chicken's identification with the South — is easier to unravel.

The dish figured in plantation cooking early on. But the first recipe didn't appear until 1824 in "The Virginia Housewife," a cookbook by Mary Randolph, a boardinghouse operator who was related to Thomas Jefferson. The delicacy was already renowned by the time The Atlanta Constitution offered readers its first version, in 1871, under the headline: "Fried Chicken: How the wives can tickle their husbands into good humor."

Along the way, the legend took root that only Southerners could make proper fried chicken. "The women of the North," Mark Twain wrote, "cannot fry a chicken."

Edge, of all people, challenged that verity in his book "Fried Chicken: An American Story," in which he declared that some of the best fried chicken he ever tasted was in the Midwest.

Like jazz, fried chicken, it seems, now belongs to the world.