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Kentucky Fried Chicken

A fried chicken recipe with a gravy made from butter, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Dust each piece of chicken with flour, salt, and pepper.

  2. Heat lard in a frying pan until smoking hot.

Fry the chicken

  1. Add chicken to the pan, cover, and cook slowly for 30 minutes, turning occasionally.

  2. Remove chicken and pour off excess fat.

Make the gravy

  1. Add butter to the pan and let it brown.

  2. Stir in flour, then pour in milk, adding salt and pepper.

  3. Let the gravy thicken and serve it separately.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Chicken + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,389 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Chicken
Provides the meat that cooks through gently under cover while the outside fries.
Flour
Coats the chicken to form a crust and thickens the gravy when stirred into the butter.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and gives the coating a crisp, browned surface.
Butter
Adds richness and browned flavor to the pan drippings that form the gravy base.
Milk
Liquid that, with flour, thickens into a creamy gravy.

The step that matters

Heating the lard until smoking hot. The fat must be hot enough to brown and seal the coating quickly. If it is too cool, the flour absorbs fat and the chicken turns greasy and pale.

“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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