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Fried Chicken

Fried chicken pieces coated in crumb and cheese batter, served with a sauce made from reduced stock, egg yolks, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fowl

  1. Cut the fowl into joints.

  2. Boil the joints in white stock until half done.

  3. Remove the fowl and drain.

Make the sauce

  1. Reduce the stock by boiling.

  2. Remove the stock from heat.

  3. Stir in the egg yolks and lemon juice.

  4. Strain the sauce.

Coat, fry and serve

  1. Dip each piece of fowl into the sauce.

  2. Dip each piece into a mixture of crumbs and grated cheese.

  3. Fry in deep fat until well browned.

  4. Serve the remaining sauce hot with the fried fowl.

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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  2. Egg + cheesetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + cheesetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Fowl
Provides the meat that is cooked through by simmering and then fried until browned.
Egg yolks
Thicken the stock-based sauce and give it a rich, smooth body.
White stock
Cooks the fowl gently and forms the base of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.
Crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating on the fried fowl.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and helps the coating brown in the fat.

The step that matters

Stir the egg yolks into the stock off the heat. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but can scramble and curdle if the sauce is still boiling, leaving it grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cheese):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cheese. 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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