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Fried Chicken
Singe the chicken, divide into pieces, and cut the joints apart. Wash well and dry on a cloth. Dredge with salt, pepper, and flour. Fry 6 slices of fat salt pork in a large frying-pan until they are crisp. When fried, take the pieces out and put a tablespoonful of butter in the pan, and when the fat is very hot, lay the chicken in and fry slowly until tender and a nice brown. Transfer the chicken to a hot platter and turn off all of the gravy but two tablespoonfuls. Thicken this with 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, and when well mixed together pour in 2 cups of fresh milk; season with salt and pepper and a teaspoonful of finely minced parsley. Boil for one minute, then pour into a gravyboat.
A plain skillet-fried chicken with a milk gravy built in the pan, of the sort that once used every part of the process — the pork fat, the browned bits, the flour dredge. A few of its assumptions belong to a kitchen that bought birds whole and undressed.
- SingeingThis addresses pin feathers and down on a freshly plucked bird. A supermarket chicken needs none of it; pull any stray pin feathers with tweezers and move on.
- Bird size and yieldA frying chicken of the period was generally a good deal smaller than most birds sold now, often in the region of 2 to 3 lb. Use a 3 to 3 1/2 lb chicken cut into 8 pieces, which serves four, and fry in two batches rather than crowding the pan.
- Fat salt porkSold in slabs and cut into thin slices. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the nearest substitute; blanch salt pork briefly if it tastes aggressively salty, and go easy on the salt in the dredge either way.
- Fry slowlyThis is the hinge. Fat pork fat plus a tablespoon of butter gives a shallow film, not deep fat, so the chicken cooks by slow contact — medium to medium-low, turned once or twice, 25 to 35 minutes. Butter alone at high heat will burn before the thighs are done.
- DonenessColour is not the test. Dark meat should read 175F at the bone and breast 165F; brown pieces that are still underdone can be finished in a 350F oven on a rack while you make the gravy.
- Fresh milk'Fresh' here most likely means sweet rather than soured milk, which was a normal pantry staple. Whole milk is what is meant; skim gives a thin, chalky gravy.
- Boil for one minuteToo short for a flour roux. Cook the flour in the fat for a full two minutes before the milk goes in, then simmer the finished gravy three to four minutes, or it will taste of raw flour. Two tablespoons of flour to two cups of milk yields a deliberately pourable gravy.
- The crisp porkThe recipe never tells you what became of the six slices you removed. Crumble them over the platter or serve them alongside.
Fried chicken with a pan gravy of milk — often called cream gravy — is a standard American home treatment of a young bird, and the version here shows why salt pork mattered: before commercial shortening and cheap bottled oil, the frying medium commonly came from the meat barrel, with butter added for flavour and browning. The dish appears here in a stripped-down form, without buttermilk soaking or the heavy crust of later restaurant styles. The instruction to singe and to cut the joints apart is a reminder that the cook was expected to butcher the bird, and that a "frying chicken" meant a genuinely young one, tender enough to come out right in half an hour over a moderate fire.