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Creamed Chicken Gravy
Pour desired amount of milk into pan where chicken has been fried. Season with butter, salt and pepper, and thicken with cornstarch rubbed smooth with a little cold milk.
A pan gravy written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already had a skillet of chicken fat and browned bits in front of you. The proportions are left entirely to judgment, so here are the numbers the original omits.
- ProportionsFor the drippings from one fried chicken, figure about 2 cups milk thickened with 2 tablespoons cornstarch. That gives a pourable gravy; use 3 tablespoons if you want it to stand up on a biscuit.
- Pour off the excess fat firstA fried-chicken pan may hold half a cup of fat or more. Leaving about 2 tablespoons along with the browned fond and pouring off the rest gives a less greasy gravy; too much fat tends to separate out.
- The slurry is the hingeCornstarch must be rubbed smooth in cold milk, as directed, and then stirred into the pan off the heat or at a bare simmer. Dry cornstarch tipped straight into hot liquid clumps.
- Cook it outOnce thickened, hold the gravy at a gentle simmer for two to three minutes. Cornstarch reaches full thickening power just at the boil, and a brief simmer removes the raw starch taste.
- Do not boil hard or hold longUnlike a flour roux, cornstarch thins again if boiled vigorously or kept hot for an extended period. Make this at the last minute and serve it.
- ButterThe butter here is for flavor and gloss, not thickening. A tablespoon whisked in at the end, off the heat, is enough.
- Scrape the panThe browned residue is the whole point of making the gravy in that particular pan. Loosen it with the first splash of milk while the pan is still hot.
- YieldTwo cups of milk makes roughly four servings over biscuits, potatoes or rice.
Milk gravy built in the frying pan is a long-established and economical American sauce, a way of turning the fat and fond left from a skillet of chicken into a second dish at no extra cost. Flour was the usual thickener in Southern kitchens, where the pan gravy became inseparable from fried chicken and biscuits; cornstarch, manufactured in quantity in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century onward, gave a glossier and slightly more delicate sauce and appears in domestic cookbooks of the period. The vagueness about quantity, "desired amount of milk," is characteristic of such collections, which recorded habits rather than formulas, and the instructions assume the reader already knows how to fry a chicken and only needs to be told what to do with what is left in the pan.