Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Fried with Okra

A stew of fried chicken pieces simmered with okra, onions, peppers, and ham in broth or water.

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

Why it works: Okra and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 715 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Fried with Okra

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the chicken and cut it into pieces for frying.

  2. Season the chicken with salt and pepper, then coat it in flour.

  3. Wash and slice the okra pods, discarding the stems.

  4. Peel and slice the onion, and finely chop the pepper.

Fry and stew

  1. Fry the chicken and ham in enough hot lard to half-cover them until browned.

  2. Add the okra, onion, and pepper, then cover with broth, gravy, or boiling water.

  3. Season with salt and stew gently until the chicken and vegetables are tender.

  4. If the broth thickens too much, add a little boiling water.

Serve

  1. Serve with plain boiled rice.

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. Okra + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together715 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Okra + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together250 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  4. Flour + okratop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together234 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein; flour coating helps it brown when fried.
Okra
Releases natural thickening that gives the stew body as it cooks.
Ham
Adds salty, savoury flavour to the fat used for frying.
Onion
Builds savoury aroma and sweetness as it softens in the stew.
Flour
Coats the chicken so it browns crisply in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken until browned. Browning the flour-coated chicken in hot lard builds deep flavour and colour. Frying too gently or crowding the pan makes it steam and turn pale, leaving the stew flat-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, flour, okra, ham, rice):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, flour, okra, ham, rice. 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipes