fried chicken

Fried chicken, also called Southern fried chicken, is a dish consisting of chicken pieces, coated with seasoned flour or batter, that are pan-fried, deep-fried, pressure-fried, or air-fried. The breading adds a crisp coating or crust to the exterior of the chicken while retaining juices in the meat. Broiler chickens are most commonly used.

The first dish known to have been deep-fried was fritters, which were popular in the European Middle Ages. However, the Scottish were the first to have been recorded as deep-frying their chicken in fat with breadcrumbs and seasonings, as evidenced by a recipe in a 1747 cookbook by Hannah Glasse and a 1773 diary entry describing fried chicken on the Isle of Skye. The first known recipe in the US did not contain the seasonings that were in the earlier Scottish recipe. There is an English cookbook from 1736 which mentions fried chicken, the "Dictionarium Domesticum", by Nathan Bailey, where it is called "a marinade of chickens". Meanwhile, in later years many West African peoples had traditions of seasoned fried chicken (though battering and cooking the chicken in palm oil).