Southern fried chicken has Scottish and West African grandparents
Before chickens were bred for fast growth, only young spring birds could take the heat of a frying pan, so fried chicken was a seasonal luxury. Its American form blends a Scottish habit of frying seasoned chicken in lard with West African battering and spice traditions carried south by enslaved cooks.
The earliest recorded frying of chicken with breadcrumbs and seasoning is Scottish: Hannah Glasse printed a recipe in 1747, and a diarist on the Isle of Skye described eating the dish in 1773. An English dictionary of 1736 already mentions something similar under the name of a chicken marinade. West African cooks battered and fried chicken in palm oil with their own seasonings, and enslaved Africans brought those techniques to plantation kitchens. The phrase fried chicken itself appears in the 1830s and turns up often in American cookbooks of the 1860s and 1870s.
For Black women in the South the dish was also an income. As early as the 1730s they were known as poultry sellers, since enslaved people were often allowed to keep chickens even when other meat was out of reach. Contrary to a common assumption, costly ingredients made fried chicken a rare treat in African-American homes, kept for special occasions, a pattern that persisted under segregation when restaurants were closed to Black customers. After abolition it spread as an everyday Southern meal, helped by the fact that it kept well in hot weather before refrigeration. Southern Jewish families even adopted it for Shabbat dinner.
Technique matters. A buttermilk soak tenderises the meat with its acidity, and flour mixed with pepper, paprika or garlic powder soaks up juices that brown into the crust. Pan-fryers seal the pieces in hot fat, lower the heat, then raise it again to colour them, arguing endlessly over how often to turn them; the browned bits left behind become gravy. Pressure frying, sold as broasting, was the method behind KFC's original recipe.
Regional offshoots abound, from Nashville hot chicken coated in a lard and cayenne paste to a Serbian-immigrant version in Barberton, Ohio, and Korean fried chicken, which took off after American troops introduced the dish following the Korean War. Nutritionally, wings are the fattiest cut at almost 40 grams of fat per 100 grams, and a 2019 study of older women linked weekly fried chicken to a 13 per cent higher risk of death from any cause.
Source: Fried chicken
