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Fritee of Cold Boiled Chicken

Battered and fried cold boiled chicken served with potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fritee of Cold Boiled Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cut cold boiled chicken into joints.

  2. Mix the yolks of 2 eggs with ½ cup milk.

  3. Add ½ pint flour and ⅛ teaspoon salt.

  4. Stir in ½ ounce melted butter until smooth.

  5. Beat the 2 egg whites to a stiff froth. Slowly add the batter to the egg whites, stirring constantly.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip chicken pieces into the batter.

  2. Fry in hot fat until golden and cooked through.

  3. Remove with a skimmer. Drain on paper.

  4. Dress the chicken on a hot dish. Garnish with parsley.

  5. Serve with baked or French fried potatoes.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter, and whipped whites lighten it so the coating puffs and stays tender.
Flour
Forms the structure of the batter that cooks into a crisp, set coating.
Milk
Loosens the batter so it coats the chicken evenly and browns through moisture and milk sugars.
Melted butter
Adds fat that adds richness and helps the coating brown and taste rounded.

The step that matters

Folding the batter into the egg whites. Whites must be beaten to a stiff froth and the batter added slowly while stirring constantly. Deflating the foam or dumping the batter in at once makes the coating heavy and dense instead of light and puffed.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, milk, flour, butter, fried potato. 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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