Skip to main content
Main

Fried Chicken

A fried chicken dish served with a milk gravy flavored with butter, pepper, salt, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Cut the chicken into quarters as for fricassee.

  2. Dredge the chicken pieces with flour and sprinkle lightly with salt.

Fry

  1. Heat a good quantity of boiling lard in a frying pan.

  2. Fry the chicken until it is a fair light brown.

  3. If desired, fry small pieces of mush and lay them on the bottom of the serving dish.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For the gravy, boil 1 cup of rich milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of butter, black pepper, salt, and chopped parsley to the milk.

  3. Stew the gravy for a little while and serve hot with the chicken from a gravy boat.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 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

Chicken
Provides the meat that is fried until golden and served hot with the gravy.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that browns in the hot fat and gives the crust its crunch.
Lard
Frying fat that conducts heat evenly and browns the flour coating into a crisp crust.
Rich milk
Forms the base of the gravy, which thickens slightly and becomes creamy as it stews.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the gravy, giving it a smoother, mellower flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the chicken until it is a fair light brown. Frying at a steady, hot lard temperature sets the flour coating and cooks the meat through. Too cool and the coating absorbs grease and turns soggy; too hot and it burns before the chicken is cooked inside.

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