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Fried Chicken

A chicken dish fried in lard and butter, served with a cream and butter gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Wash the chicken thoroughly until all the blood is removed.

  2. Cut the chicken into pieces and rub a little coarse sea salt over them.

  3. Roll each piece in flour.

Fry and make the gravy

  1. Fry the chicken pieces in a mixture of lard and butter until they are a nice brown color.

  2. To make the gravy, combine cream and butter in a pan.

  3. If the cream is not thick, add a little additional flour and season to taste.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Chicken + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Flour
Forms a light coating that crisps and browns during frying and thickens the gravy.
Lard
Fat for frying that carries heat evenly and helps the coating brown.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the frying fat and to the gravy.
Cream
Forms the base of the gravy and gives it richness and body.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken until nicely browned. 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 may cook unevenly.

“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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