Fried Chicken

Fried chicken is a dish of chicken pieces coated in seasoned flour or batter and cooked by pan-frying, deep-frying, pressure-frying or air-frying, producing a crisp exterior around juicy meat, typically made from broiler chickens. The earliest documented deep-frying of chicken in fat with breadcrumbs and seasoning is Scottish, recorded in Hannah Glasse's 1747 cookbook and in period diary entries, but the dish familiar in the United States developed from a blend of Scottish frying technique and West African seasoning traditions, brought together in the kitchens of enslaved Africans in the American South. The term fried chicken itself came into use in the 1830s and appeared regularly in American cookbooks by the 1860s and 1870s. It became a lasting culinary staple of the American South, in part because it traveled well before refrigeration was available, and in the twentieth century it was commercialized and spread worldwide by fast-food chains such as KFC and Popeyes.