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Maryland Fried Chicken

A fried chicken dish from Maryland, coated in a cake-batter consistency flour mixture and served with cream gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Maryland Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dress and cut the chicken into pieces suitable for frying.

  2. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper.

  3. In a bowl, make a batter by whisking the eggs and adding flour until it reaches a cake batter consistency.

  4. Dip each piece of chicken into the batter, ensuring it is well coated.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the battered chicken in boiling lard until golden brown and cooked through.

  2. Serve the fried chicken with cream gravy and garnish with 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Young chicken
Provides the meat that is coated, fried and cooked through.
Eggs
Bind the flour to the chicken, helping the batter cling and form a coating.
Flour
Forms the cake-batter coating that browns and crisps in the hot lard.
Boiling lard
Conducts heat to fry the coating golden brown and cook the chicken through.

The step that matters

Frying the battered chicken in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough to brown the batter quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy, while the chicken may stay undercooked inside. Frying in batches keeps the temperature steady.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, egg, flour, pepper, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, flour, pepper, cream. 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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