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Fried Chicken

Fried chicken prepared by soaking in salt water, coating with flour and egg, frying in lard and butter, then served with a gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the chicken in salt water for one hour.

Fry the chicken

  1. In a frying pan, heat equal parts of lard and butter to cover the chicken.

  2. Roll the chicken in flour, dip it in the beaten egg, and drop it into the boiling fat.

  3. Fry until brown.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Pour most of the fat from the pan, thicken with browned flour, add hot milk, and serve in a gravy boat.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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 meat that is cooked and served as the main dish.
Flour
Forms a coating that browns and crisps during frying.
Egg
Helps the flour coating adhere to the chicken before frying.
Lard
Serves as the frying fat, conducting heat and adding richness to the crust.
Butter
Adds flavor and browning to the frying fat.
Browned flour
Adds color and a toasted flavor and thickens the gravy.

The step that matters

Drop the chicken into the boiling fat. The fat must be hot enough to brown and crisp the coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating soaks up grease and turns heavy and greasy instead of crisp.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, butter, flour, egg, milk. 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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