Fried Chicken From 1736 - Comfort Food Origins - 18th Century Cooking

It's been seven years since we've done our 18th century fried chicken episode, our first viral video, and I've been thinking about it every day. Will it still hold up? Let's find out. We did this recipe seven years ago, and in the comments all the time, we get the talk about the marinade, and it is so special in this, the acidity of it and what's going on with that. In fact, this recipe comes from a marinade recipe. Basically, the frying is almost like a throw-off part of this recipe. It's all about what you do with the chicken beforehand, and that's different from what we think about fried chicken, right? We think, oh, it's all about the batter and what's happening with the frying, but in this recipe, it's all about what happens before that, what happens with the marinade. So we might think that fried chicken is classically an American dish, but this recipe is almost 300 years old, and it's English. It's found in the Dictionarium Domesticum by Nathan Bailey, 1736. That's right, 1736. So this is very, very old. The recipe is called a marinade of chickens. Cut the chickens into quarters and marinate them in the juice of lemons and verjuice or with vinegar, salt, clove, pepper, chibbles, or a bay leaf or two. Let them lie in this marinade for the space of three hours. Then having made a sort of a clear paste or batter with flour, white wine, and the yolks of three eggs, drop the chickens into it and then fry them in lard and serve them in the form of a pyramid with fried parsley and slices of lemon. So let's break this down a bit. There are a few terms that we might find confusing. First, verjuice. Now, verjuice is not uncommon. We can find it today. It is a kind of a sour, it's, I mean, it's like similar to vinegar, but it's a sour juice that's made with green grapes or grapes that haven't been ripened. We're gonna be using vinegar as the recipe suggests, and we want to use malt vinegar, which would have been the typical vinegar in our time period. And what about this term chibbles? What is going on there? Maybe you've heard of chibbles before. You can tell me in the comment section. Chibbles are green onions. Maybe they use that in other parts of the world. I don't know, but green onions, that's what we're gonna be putting in the marinade. This has been bothering me for seven years. You know what this needs? It needs some nutmeg. This marinade smells great, especially with all those spices. That nutmeg, it's really gonna set it off. It's fun to dig through the historical references to find people eating fried chicken. That's a lot more difficult. So we have a couple of examples. Nicholas Cresswell, he's traveling in the colonies about 1774, and he mentions while he's in the colonies, it seems like he's eating nothing but chicken and bacon. Now, I'm sure some of that chicken was fried. If we want a true example of somebody saying fried chicken, well, Dr. Hamilton is traveling in 1750, and he's going up the East Coast. He is from Great Britain. He is in the colonies as a doctor, and he's decided to take a break from his practice because he has tuberculosis, and he needs to travel for his health. Now, he is a very sarcastic man as he's traveling, and he's talking about the places he's staying at. And at one location, he says, I have fried chicken and bacon. He doesn't say that it was bad, which normally he would. So he must have had some great fried chicken at that tavern. Fried food can be so simple, and you don't really find that many recipes in 18th century cookbooks for fried foods because it is just that simple. It's almost like a throwaway line at the end of the recipe. Oh yeah, do this, and don't forget to fry it. Most references in the time period, we'll talk about frying in lard. If you need a lot of oil for frying, lard is the place to go to in the 18th century. They didn't have the plant-based oil or the seed oils that we do today. So it's lard, lard, lard. And occasionally, if you're just pan frying, you might use clarified butter. The batter is very simple on this one. We have flour, we have white wine, and we have some egg yolks. So let's get this going. The recipe mentions the garnish of fried parsley. That's gonna be fun. We wanna do that, though, before. It mentions it last. We wanna fry this up first. It'll give us a chance to test the oil temperature, and we'll be able to fry this in nice, clean oil. It has been seven years since I've tried this out. I've had regular fried chicken probably a hundred times since then, and I really wanna find out if this does hold up. So I remember this chicken being so good, and the acidity in this marinade should bring some great freshness to something that's normally kind of flat because it's deep fat fried. And of course, this crispy, crispy crunch it should have. Let's find out. That marinade is really good. That really changes what's happening with this chicken. Seven years later, and this is as good as I remember. So good.