Skip to main content
Main

Fried Chickens

A dish of chicken pieces fried in lard, served with a milk and butter sauce and fried parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Fried Chickens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Dredge the chicken pieces well with flour and sprinkle with salt.

  2. Heat a good quantity of boiling lard in a pan.

  3. Fry the chicken pieces until they are light brown.

  4. Fry small pieces of mush and picked parsley until golden.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine the milk, butter, pepper, salt, and chopped parsley; stew briefly.

  2. Pour the milk mixture over the fried chicken and garnish with fried parsley.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Flour
Forms a dry coating on the chicken that helps it brown and crisp in the fat.
Boiling lard
Conducts heat to cook the chicken and gives the coating its golden, crisp surface.
Rich milk
Forms a creamy, savoury sauce that moistens the fried chicken.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the milk sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken until light brown. The lard must be hot enough to crisp the flour coating quickly; if it is too cool, the chicken absorbs fat and turns greasy, and if the heat is too high the coating can scorch before the meat is cooked through.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, flour, milk, butter, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour, milk, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More fried chicken recipes

with Tomato Sauce 6Italian 6Oven 6with Cream Gravy 5Virginia 5Marinated 4 See all 214 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesChicken PanadaChicken Panada75 recipes