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Fried Chicken
Very young and tender chicken should be selected for frying. Singe, and remove the pinfeathers, clean and disjoint, as for fricassee. Dust each piece with salt and pepper, roll in flour, and brown in a frying-pan in sufficient Snowdrift to prevent sticking. The chicken should be turned only once, the frying being accomplished slowly in about twenty minutes. Then place the chicken in a pan, dot it with a little extra Snowdrift, steam it for an hour and serve with a gravy made of the drippings in the frying pan. It will probably be necessary to add an extra tablespoonful of flour, a little more salt and pepper, and instead of water, as usual, pour in a cupful of very rich milk or light cream.
A promotional-cookbook version of Southern skillet chicken, written when birds were smaller, tougher and slaughtered at home. The method still works; the timings assume a bird nothing like the one you will buy.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, which appears to have sponsored this book. Any neutral solid shortening, lard or a high-smoke-point oil does the same job; the recipe asks only for enough fat to keep the pieces from sticking.
- Singeing and pinfeathersInstructions for a freshly killed bird. A supermarket chicken needs neither, though it is worth running a hand over the skin for stray quills and patting the pieces very dry before flouring.
- "Disjoint, as for fricassee"Break the bird down at the joints into eight or ten pieces: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and the breast split and each half cut across. Uniform pieces are what makes the single-turn method work.
- The single turnThis is the hinge of the recipe. Leave the pieces alone until the underside is set and deeply browned, roughly 8 to 10 minutes over medium heat, then turn once. Repeated flipping strips the flour coating off before it crusts.
- "Steam it for an hour"Means transferring the browned pieces to a pan, covering it, and letting them finish in their own moisture over low heat. A modern broiler-fryer is done in 15 to 20 minutes this way; an hour will leave you with dry, shredded meat. Cook until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F.
- The gravyA cream gravy. Pour off all but about two tablespoons of fat, whisk in the extra tablespoon of flour, cook it a minute until it smells nutty, then add the cup of milk or cream off the heat and whisk smooth before returning it to the burner.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb chicken cut this way serves four.
This comes from a cookbook published to sell Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening marketed in the early twentieth century as a clean, modern replacement for lard — cottonseed oil having gone from a milling waste product to a major American fat in the space of a generation. The method itself is older than the brand: brown hard in a skillet, then cover and let the bird finish gently in its own steam. The cream gravy built from the pan drippings is the signature of the Southern version, and the recipe's aside that milk is used "instead of water, as usual" indicates that water was the usual gravy liquid.