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Hoosier Fried Chicken

A fried chicken dish seasoned with salt and pepper, coated in flour, and cooked in butter and lard, finished in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hoosier Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Joint the chicken and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Roll the chicken in flour.

Fry and bake

  1. Fry in an iron skillet with butter and lard until browned on all sides.

  2. Cover with boiling water and tightly cover the skillet.

  3. Bake until the chicken is tender.

Finish

  1. If needed, thicken the gravy with a mixture of water and flour.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the meat that is browned, then cooked until tender in the pan.
All-purpose flour
Forms a coating that browns in the hot fat and helps thicken the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor for browning the chicken in the skillet.
Lard
Adds fat that holds high heat well for frying and browning the chicken.

The step that matters

Fry in an iron skillet until browned on all sides. Browning builds color and flavor through the Maillard reaction. Crowding or low heat steams the pieces instead, leaving them pale and soft-skinned.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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