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Fried Chicken

Fried chicken served with a milk‑butter gravy and parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 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 and garnish

  1. Fry the chicken in a good quantity of boiling lard until golden brown.

  2. Fry small pieces of mush and lay them on the bottom of the serving dish.

  3. Garnish the dish with cured parsley.

Make the milk sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, boil the milk and add a small piece of butter, pepper, salt, and chopped parsley.

  2. Stew the mixture briefly 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. 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

Chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender inside while the outside fries crisp.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that browns in the hot fat and helps the crust stick.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying, browning the coating and crisping the chicken's surface.
Rich milk
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it body and a creamy texture when heated.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the milk sauce, rounding its flavour and smoothing its texture.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken in boiling lard until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to brown the flour coating quickly; if it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy, and the chicken cooks unevenly before the crust forms.

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.

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