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Fried Chicken

Fried chicken coated in flour, cooked in butter and lard, then baked, served with a milk‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Fried Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the chicken

  1. Joint the chicken and wipe it dry with a clean cloth.

  2. Roll the chicken in flour.

Fry and bake

  1. In a roasting pan, heat the butter and lard until boiling hot.

  2. Add the chicken, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and fry until brown on one side.

  3. Turn the chicken to the other side, cover closely, and bake in the oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  4. Remove the chicken to a hot platter.

Make the gravy

  1. Stir the flour into the milk, pour it into the pan, and add a pinch of salt and a dash of pepper.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and pour it over the chicken.

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. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Young chicken
Provides the meat that is fried and baked until tender and browned.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor and helps the chicken brown in the hot fat.
Lard
Fat that heats to a high temperature for frying, giving the skin a crisp, brown surface.
Flour
Coats the chicken and thickens the milk into a gravy.
Milk
Forms the base of the gravy, adding creaminess when thickened with flour.

The step that matters

Fry until brown on one side, then turn. Browning in hot fat sets the flour coating and builds color and flavor before the covered baking finishes cooking the meat through without drying it out.

“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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