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Cold Chicken

Fried chicken coated in bread crumbs and cooked in clarified fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cold Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat a saucepan half-filled with clarified fat.

  2. Beat the egg in a plate until very light.

  3. Cut the chicken into neat pieces and dip them in the beaten egg.

  4. Season the bread crumbs with salt and pepper on a sheet of paper.

  5. Roll the chicken pieces in the bread crumbs until well coated.

Fry and drain

  1. When the fat is hot, fry the chicken pieces until they turn pale brown.

  2. Remove the chicken and place it on a paper towel to drain.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Chicken
Provides the main protein, which cooks through in the hot fat while the coating turns crisp.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the chicken so the coating adheres during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Frying the coated chicken. The fat must be hot before the chicken goes in. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisp, and the chicken cooks 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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