Fried Chicken
Cut chicken in pieces for serving; dip in milk, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in flour or in crumbs, egg and crumb, and fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper; serve on slices of buttered toast with Béchamel sauce, Allemande, or Mushroom sauce.
A terse turn-of-the-century formula that assumes a deep kettle of hot fat and a cook who already knows what a frying chicken is. The gaps worth filling are fat temperature, bird size, and doneness.
- Fat temperature is the whole recipeDeep fat for chicken wants 350-365F. Hotter and the crumb coating colors before the joint is cooked through; cooler and the coating soaks. A thermometer replaces the period practice of timing how fast a cube of bread browned in the fat; this recipe gives no test of its own.
- What "chicken" meantA frying chicken of this period was a young bird, generally somewhere in the range of 1.5 to 3 lb dressed, cut up for serving. A modern 4 lb supermarket broiler gives pieces far too thick to cook through in deep fat at this temperature; buy the smallest bird available or use thighs, drumsticks and halved breasts.
- DonenessCook to 165F at the thickest part of the breast and 175F in the thigh. Expect 10-14 minutes for small pieces, with dark meat needing longer than white; fry in batches by cut rather than all at once.
- The three coatings offeredThe recipe gives a choice: milk then flour, milk then crumbs, or the full egg-and-crumb (crumb, dip in beaten egg, crumb again). The egg-and-crumb is the sturdiest and the one that suits the sauced, plated presentation here.
- Brown paperUnprinted grocery paper was the standard drain. A wire rack set over a sheet pan works better, since paper traps steam beneath the pieces and softens the crust.
- The saucesBechamel is milk-based white sauce; Allemande is a veloute finished with egg yolk and lemon, a name that became much less common in later cookery; mushroom sauce here means a brown or white sauce with sauteed mushrooms. All three are made separately and spooned over.
- Fat to useThe original would most likely have meant lard or beef fat, a kettle kept and reused. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the job; you need enough depth to float the pieces, roughly 3 inches in a heavy pot filled no more than halfway.
- YieldNo yield is stated; one small frying chicken with toast and sauce would serve perhaps three to four.
This is Northern hotel-style fried chicken rather than the skillet-fried Southern dish: the bird is crumbed, dropped into a kettle of deep fat, then set on buttered toast and masked with a French sauce. The toast-and-sauce plating shows the strong hold that restaurant service had on American domestic cooking around 1900. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is best remembered for its confectionery, but like other maker-sponsored books of the period it also runs to a full household manual with meat, fish and vegetable chapters that owe a clear debt to the Boston cooking-school style.