Skip to main content
Main

Fried Chicken

Fried chicken marinated in butter, flour, spices, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marinade

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and mix in the flour with pepper, salt, vinegar, parsley, green onions, thyme, bay leaf, cloves, onion, carrot or turnip, and a little water.

  2. Heat the mixture until lukewarm.

Marinate and fry

  1. Marinate the chicken pieces in this mixture for 3 hours.

  2. Remove the chicken, dry the pieces, and coat them in flour.

  3. Fry the chicken until golden brown and garnish with fried parsley.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through while the outside fries to a crisp coating.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the marinade and helps carry the herbs and seasonings.
Flour
Thickens the marinade and forms a coating that browns and crisps when fried.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps tenderize the chicken during the long marinating time.

The step that matters

Drying the chicken before coating and frying. Surface moisture turns to steam and makes the flour coating soggy or cause the oil to spatter, so the pieces should be patted dry before they are coated and fried to brown properly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, butter, flour, pepper, vinegar, parsley, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, pepper, vinegar, parsley, thyme. 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.

More fried chicken recipes

with Tomato Sauce 6Italian 6Oven 6with Cream Gravy 5Virginia 5Marinated 4 See all 214 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes