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Breadcrumbs (Young chicken egg cupful)
1 young chicken 1 egg 3/4 cupful Crisco Tartare sauce Salt and pepper to taste Mixed pickles Singe, empty, and split chicken in half; take breastbone out and sprinkle salt and pepper over. Melt ½ cupful Crisco in frying pan and fry chicken half hour, turning it now and then. Remove from pan and place between two dishes with heavy weight on top, till it is nearly cold. Then dip in egg beaten up, and roll in breadcrumbs. Melt remaining Crisco, then sprinkle it all over chicken; roll in breadcrumbs once more. Fry in hot Crisco to golden color. Serve at once with a garnish of chopped pickles, and tartare sauce.
A spatchcocked young chicken, shallow-fried, pressed flat while it cools, then double-breaded and fried again. The recipe assumes a bird you butchered yourself and a cook who knows what "hot fat" means; both need translating.
- The hinge: press it while warmThe weighting step is what makes the dish. Flattening the half-cooked bird between two plates under a weight compacts the meat so the crumb coating sits flush and the second frying browns evenly. Skip it and you have ordinary fried chicken with a loose crust.
- "Young chicken"A broiler of about 2 to 2.5 lb, split in half through the breast, not a 5 lb roaster. A larger bird will not cook through in the half hour given and will not press flat.
- Singe and emptyInstructions for a bird bought whole with pinfeathers and viscera still in. A supermarket chicken needs neither; just remove the breastbone and any keel cartilage so the halves lie flat.
- Crisco quantitiesThree-quarters of a cupful total: half a cup for the first frying, the remaining quarter cup melted and brushed or drizzled over the egged and crumbed bird before the second coat of crumbs. The final "fry in hot Crisco" needs a fresh pan of fat, perhaps half an inch deep, which the ingredient list does not account for. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works.
- Frying temperatureThe first frying should be moderate, around 325 to 340F, so the chicken cooks through without the surface burning in thirty minutes. The final browning wants hotter fat, 350 to 375F, and only three or four minutes a side since the meat is already cooked.
- DonenessThe original trusts the clock. Check the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F before you press the bird; if it does not, the second frying is too brief to make up the difference.
- The double crumb coatEgg, crumbs, melted fat, crumbs again. The fat between the layers is what gives the shatter-crisp shell. Let the coated bird sit ten minutes so the crumbs adhere before it goes back into the pan.
- Yield and serviceTwo halves, so two generous portions. Tartare sauce and chopped mixed pickles are not optional garnish here; the fried crumb crust is rich and flat-tasting without something sharp beside it.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale — a cookbook produced to teach American cooks what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable shortening that behaved like lard but kept without refrigeration and carried no animal flavour. Nearly every recipe in it is an existing dish with Crisco written into the fat line, and this one is no exception: a split, weighted, crumbed and fried young bird is the old European treatment usually met as chicken à la diable or en crapaudine, the same logic as the Tuscan pollo al mattone cooked under a brick. The pressing may also have served a practical end, since a flattened half can be fried in a shallow pan rather than deep fat. Tartare sauce and mixed pickles as the accompaniment fit the Anglo-American hotel repertoire of the period, in which crumbed and fried dishes were often sent out with a cold, sharp sauce beside them.