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Fried Spring Chicken

Fried Spring Chicken is a whole chicken cut into joints, coated in flour, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,958 recipes. Both carry piperonal, which smells bitter, coconut. The science ↓

Fried Spring Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Select a large, plump spring chicken.

  2. Draw and cut it into natural joints.

  3. Soak the chicken in ice water for five minutes, then drain and refrigerate for two hours.

  4. Dredge the chicken thickly with flour and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat the lard in a frying pan.

  2. When hot, sauté the chicken, turning often to prevent browning, until thoroughly cooked.

  3. Serve with cream gravy.

  4. Optionally, fry bacon in the lard to increase fat and serve with the chicken.

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. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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
Provides the meat that is cooked through by frying.
Flour
Forms a thick coating that crisps during frying and helps the crust hold.
Lard
Fat for frying that conducts heat and gives the chicken a rich, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Turning the chicken in the hot lard. Frequent turning keeps the flour coating from over-browning or burning on one side. Cooking the joints thoroughly through matters because thick pieces can look done outside while the inside stays undercooked.

“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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