WEST HARRISON, Ind. — If you see a steeple in southeastern Indiana, you can be pretty sure that fried chicken is nearby. If you see the steeple in West Harrison, about 20 miles from the Indiana-Ohio-Kentucky border, that chicken is fried across the street at St. Leon Tavern by the owner, Aaron Klenke. Most people would call the place a bar, but I call it a place that serves some of the best fried chicken I’ve tasted.

In this corner of Indiana, fried chicken is a part of the native soul — a staple of the after-church dinner and never very far from Sunday services.

“We call it chicken paradise,” said Janet Litmer, 60, manager of the Fireside Inn in Enochsburg . A common refrain here is “If the Colonel had been born in southern Indiana, he’d have been a general.”

Until my wife, the novelist Ann Hood, brought me to Greensburg, her father’s hometown, telling me I was about to have the best fried chicken of my life, I was certain that I made the best chicken I’d had in my life. To my delight, she was right.