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Fried Chicken
Prepare young chickens, dividing them as for stewing; wash and drain but do not dry the pieces. Roll each thoroughly in flour mixed with salt and pepper. Drop in deep fat and fry until tender.
If the chickens are not very young it will be safer to stew them before frying.
Four sentences of instruction that assume a cook who already knows what deep fat looks like when it is ready. The gaps worth filling are the size of bird, the fat temperature, and how you know it is done.
- "Young chickens"A broiler-fryer of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, cut in eight or nine pieces. Modern supermarket birds run 3 1/2 to 5 lb; they are still young and tender, but the pieces are much thicker, and they will colour before the thigh bone is cooked through.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe never gives one. 350F is right for chicken: hot enough to set the crust immediately, cool enough that the interior catches up. Much below that and the coating absorbs fat; much above it and the crust colours well before the joint is cooked.
- Doneness, not tenderness"Fry until tender" is a judgment call. Take dark meat to 175F at the bone and breast pieces to 165F on an instant-read thermometer; dark meat is more pleasant slightly past the safe minimum. Expect 12 to 15 minutes for thighs and drumsticks, less for wings and breast.
- Wet pieces are deliberate"Wash and drain but do not dry" looks like an oversight and is not. The film of water on the skin helps the seasoned flour cling and form a crust; flour clings less well to dry skin.
- Seasoning the flourNo proportions are given. About 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper to a cup of flour is a reasonable working ratio, since most of the flour is left in the dish.
- Deep fat means deep fatThis is not skillet frying with an inch of shortening. Use a heavy pot no more than half full, fry in batches of three or four pieces so the temperature does not collapse, and let the fat return to 350F between batches.
- Stewing firstThe fallback for an older bird — simmer the pieces until tender, cool and drain them well, then flour and fry only to colour, three or four minutes. The purpose is crust, not cooking, and a wet stewed piece will spit badly in hot fat.
- YieldOne 2 1/2 lb bird serves three, or four at a table with substantial sides. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
Deep-fat frying of chicken belongs to a particular moment in American cooking: by the 1910s and 1920s commercial vegetable shortening and cast-iron pots deep enough to hold several inches of fat had made the technique a household proposition rather than a hotel one. Older fried chicken recipes generally have the pieces cooking in a shallow bath of lard in a covered pan, half frying and half steaming; this version, with pieces dropped into deep fat, produces an all-over crust and takes less attention. The instruction to stew a tougher bird before frying is a reminder that until the broiler industry standardised the market in the mid-twentieth century, a chicken's age was highly variable and often unknown, and cooks were expected to judge it themselves.