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Fried Chicken
Fried chicken is prepared and cooked same as Chicken Fricassee, with Brown Sauce, chicken always being used, never fowl.
Fried Chicken (Southern Style) Clean, singe, and cut in pieces for serving, two young chickens. Plunge in cold water, drain but do not wipe. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and coat thickly with flour, having as much flour adhere to chicken as possible. Try out one pound fat salt pork cut in pieces, and cook chicken slowly in fat until tender and well browned. Serve with White Sauce made of half milk and half cream.
Two recipes sit under one heading: a one-line cross-reference to the fricassee method, and the Southern skillet version that most cooks will actually want. The hinge is the rendered salt pork fat and the slow cooking in it — this is shallow frying at a gentle heat, not a hot deep fry.
- Chicken, not fowlIn this book "chicken" means a young bird tender enough to fry; "fowl" means an older laying hen that needs long moist cooking. No weights are given, but "young chickens" of the period were small birds, perhaps 2 to 2 1/2 lb each; a single 3 1/2 to 4 lb supermarket broiler, cut into eight or ten pieces, is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Try out the pork"Try out" means render slowly over low heat until the fat runs clear and the pork scraps are crisp. A pound of salt pork yields something under two cups of fat, which is what you want: enough to come a third to halfway up the pieces, not to submerge them.
- The wet-then-floured coatingPlunging in cold water and draining without wiping is deliberate — the film of water makes the flour cling in a thick paste that fries into a heavy crust. Salt and pepper go on the chicken itself, before the flour, so season generously.
- What "slowly" meansHold the fat around 300–325°F. Higher and the thick flour coating browns before the thigh meat is done. Figure 12 to 15 minutes per side for dark meat, a little less for breast pieces, turning once.
- DonenessThe original goes by "tender and well browned." Use a thermometer instead: 165°F at the thickest part of the breast, 175°F in the thigh, measured away from bone.
- White Sauce, half milk and half creamFarmer's White Sauce is a roux of butter and flour with the liquid whisked in. The recipe simply says to serve it with the chicken; making it in the frying pan with the browned drippings and a couple of tablespoons of the leftover seasoned flour turns it into cream gravy, though that step is not in the text. Season it.
- The fricassee cross-referenceThe first sentence sends you to Chicken Fricassee, made here with Brown Sauce rather than white, and specifies chicken rather than fowl. What that method actually involves is not spelled out on this page, so the fricassee entry is needed to make sense of it. It is a different dish from the Southern version below.
- YieldTwo small chickens serve six to eight; one modern broiler serves four.
Fannie Farmer's book is a Boston product through and through, which makes the labelled "Southern Style" entry the interesting one — it is included as a regional specimen. The technique it records is the older Southern skillet method: pork fat rather than a neutral oil, a thick flour crust, slow shallow frying, and a milk gravy built in the same pan. Rendering a pound of salt pork for the frying medium reflects a kitchen where cured pork was the standing fat supply rather than something bought in a tin; the crisp scraps left behind were not wasted. The insistence on chicken and never fowl is a reminder that before year-round broiler production, a frying bird was seasonal and young, and an old hen went into the stockpot or under a lid with liquid instead.