Home › Poultry and Left-over Meats › To Fry Chicken
To Fry Chicken
Select young chicken. Cut up. Wash, drain, but do not dry, Dredge well with flour and seasoning. Use drippings for fat-salt pork, bacon, beef or chicken fat will do, or use part butter and part other fat. Cook chicken slowly in fat in frying pan until tender, and well browned. Serve with cream or milk gravy. 2 tablespoons butter -pound fresh mushrooms 1 teaspoon salt
A skillet-fried chicken in the plainest American style, written for a cook who already knew what the pan should sound like. The instructions are terse but complete; the only real omissions are quantities and time.
- The hinge: do not dry the chickenThe damp surface is what makes the dredging flour cling and form a crust. Drain the pieces in a colander and flour them while still wet, then let them sit five or ten minutes so the coating turns pasty and stays put in the fat.
- "Young chicken"A broiler-fryer of about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 lb, cut into eight or ten pieces. Older fowl were generally stewed rather than fried, being too tough for quick cooking in a pan. A supermarket cut-up fryer is the closest modern equivalent.
- "Cook slowly"Fat at roughly 325F, deep enough to come a third to halfway up the pieces. Figure 30 to 40 minutes total, turning once or twice, dark meat first into the pan. Chicken is done at 165F at the thickest part of the thigh.
- DrippingsRendered pork or bacon fat, beef drippings and chicken fat all work and all taste different; bacon fat is the most assertive. The suggested part-butter mixture browns handsomely but scorches easily, so keep the heat down or use clarified butter.
- "Dredge well with flour and seasoning"No amounts are given. About 1 cup flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper coats a whole cut-up bird, with plenty to spare.
- Cream or milk gravyPour off all but 2 to 3 tablespoons of fat, leaving the browned bits, whisk in 3 tablespoons of the seasoned dredging flour, cook a minute or two, then add 2 cups milk or a mix of milk and cream and simmer until it coats a spoon. Season hard; unsalted milk gravy tastes of nothing.
- The stray ingredient listThe butter, mushrooms and salt at the end do not belong to this dish; they appear to be stray lines from a neighbouring recipe, and the mushroom quantity is missing its fraction in any case.
- YieldOne bird serves four generously, three if the gravy is going over biscuits or potatoes as well.
Pan-frying chicken in shallow fat is one of the oldest continuously practised American cooking methods, appearing in American cookbooks from the early nineteenth century onward and often traced to a convergence of British battered-and-fried poultry with West African frying traditions in Southern kitchens. What dates this particular version is its indifference to the fat: drippings from salt pork, bacon, beef or the bird itself, or a part-butter blend, whichever the household happened to have rendered and saved. The cream gravy built in the same pan is the point of the frugality; nothing browned is thrown away.