Julia Sanderson
CHICKEN-Southern Style Chicken fried to a golden brown in plenty of butter and, when taken up on a hot platter, covered with a thick gravy made of a spoonful of flour, browned in the chicken pan and mixed with half a cup of water and two cups of cream. Pepper and salt to taste.
I love chicken any way at all-fried, boiled, or broiled but mostly southern style.
This is a sketch rather than a set of instructions — no quantities, no pan size, no times. What follows fills in the gaps a competent cook needs to work from it.
- The title is wrongThere is no cheese anywhere in the method, and nothing is roasted. "Cheese Roast Chicken" looks like a compositor's error or a mis-set heading from an adjacent page; treat the dish as skillet-fried chicken with cream gravy.
- ScaleAssume one 3 to 3 1/2 lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces, which serves four. The gravy quantities given — half a cup of water and two cups of cream — make a generous amount of sauce for that.
- Flour the bird, not just the gravy"Fried to a golden brown" in this period usually implied a seasoned flour dredge, which is also what leaves the browned fond the gravy depends on. Salt and pepper the flour, coat the pieces, and shake off the excess.
- Butter alone will burn"Plenty of butter" over the twenty-odd minutes this takes will scorch the milk solids and blacken the crust. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, holds the same flavour at frying heat.
- Thicken properlyOne spoonful of flour will not thicken two and a half cups of liquid; you will get a thin sauce. For a gravy that coats, use three to four tablespoons of flour cooked in an equal volume of the pan fat before any liquid goes in.
- Build the gravy in orderPour off all but the fat needed for the roux, brown the flour in it, then add the half cup of water first to loosen the fond and only then the cream, stirring. Cream added to a dry hot pan will catch and split.
- DonenessFry covered over medium heat, turning once — roughly 12 minutes a side for thighs and drumsticks, less for breast. The thickest part should read 165F; the colour of the crust is not a reliable guide with a butter fry.
- Cream"Cream" here is probably richer than modern light cream, and heavy cream is the safer reading. Half-and-half or light cream will thin out and is likelier to break in a hot pan.
Fried chicken with milk or cream gravy is a version of the dish long associated with the upland and Border South; the pan sauce made from drippings and dairy is the same economy that produced sawmill and sausage gravy. That Julia Sanderson ested ested — born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and a fixture of Broadway musical comedy before her long second career on radio with her husband Frank Crumit — offers it as "Southern Style" says more about the dish's national reach by the 1920s and 1930s than about her own kitchen. In celebrity cookbooks of this kind, the charm of the signature was the point, and the recipe was only the excuse for it.