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Chicken, Fried

A whole chicken fried in lard, dusted with flour and salt, served with fried meal cakes and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,675 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Chicken, Fried

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the breast bone from the chicken.

  2. Dust the chicken with flour and rub a little coarse sea salt on it.

Fry

  1. Heat the lard in a frying pan over medium heat.

  2. Place the chicken in the pan and fry until it is light brown.

  3. Fry a little parsley in the pan with the chicken.

Make and fry the mush cakes

  1. Make a stiff mush with the sifted meal and let it cool completely.

  2. Cut the mush into cakes and fry until light brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Chicken + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Chicken and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,559 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
Forms the main dish, browning and cooking through in hot fat to become crisp outside.
Lard
Frying fat that conducts heat evenly and gives the crust its browning and rich flavour.
Flour
Dusted on the chicken, it helps form a crisp, browned coating when fried.
Sifted meal
Mixed into a stiff mush that sets as it cools, holding its shape for frying into cakes.

The step that matters

Let the mush cool completely before cutting and frying. A stiff mush must cool and set fully; if it is still warm or soft, the cakes can break apart or absorb fat and fail to hold their shape in the pan.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, flour. 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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