Home › Poultry and Game › Fried Spring Chicken
Fried Spring Chicken
Clean and disjoint, then soak in salt water for about two hours. Put in frying pan equal parts of lard and butter, enough to cover chicken. Roll each piece in barley flour, dip in beaten egg, then roll in crumbs, and drop into boiling fat. Fry until browned on both sides. Serve on flat platter garnished with sprigs of parsley. Pour most of the fat from frying pan, thicken remainder with browned flour, add to it a cup of boiling water or milk. Serve in gravy bowl.
A conventional pan-fry, but two instructions need translating: "boiling fat" is a temperature, not a rolling boil, and "until browned on both sides" is not the same as cooked through on a modern bird.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" here means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the chicken goes in, roughly 325-350F. Butter mixed half-and-half with lard will darken and speckle at that heat; clarified butter, or a smaller proportion of butter, keeps the crust from tasting scorched.
- Spring chickenA spring chicken in this period was a young bird of about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb dressed, which is why browning alone was enough to cook it. Supermarket fryers run 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 lb, so brown the pieces, then finish them in a 350F oven or covered over low heat until the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F.
- The salt-water soakTwo hours in salt water is a brine, and it does seasoning work the recipe never mentions again. Use about 1/4 cup table salt per quart of cold water, refrigerated, and pat the pieces thoroughly dry before flouring or the coating will slide off.
- Barley flourBarley flour gives a soft, slightly sweet dusting layer. All-purpose flour or rice flour substitutes directly; the point of the first coat is only to give the egg something to grip.
- CrumbsThese are dried bread crumbs made from stale loaf, closer in texture to fine homemade crumbs than to panko. Panko will work but browns faster, so drop the fat toward 325F if you use it.
- Browned flourBrowned flour meant flour toasted dry in a pan or oven until nut-coloured, kept in a jar for gravies. It thickens less than raw flour, so figure roughly 3 tablespoons browned flour to 2 tablespoons fat and one cup of liquid, and simmer a few minutes to lose any raw taste.
- The gravy liquidAdd the boiling water or milk gradually and off the fiercest heat, whisking, or the roux will seize into lumps. Milk gives the paler country gravy; water lets the browned flour and pan drippings dominate.
- YieldOne cut-up bird serves three to four. The cup of gravy is enough for the platter but not for a second dish of potatoes or biscuits alongside; double it if that is the plan.
"Spring chicken" was once a literal calendar term: before year-round hatchery production and controlled lighting, chicks came in late winter and early spring and were eaten young in the first warm months, while older hens went to the stewpot. Recipes like this one assumed a small, tender, quick-cooking bird, which is why the instruction is simply to fry until browned. The barley flour and the jar of pre-browned flour for thickening are both marks of a pantry stocked by habit rather than by shopping list, when a cook kept toasted flour on hand the way we keep cornstarch.