Fried chicken
dish consisting of chicken pieces which have been coated in a seasoned batter and pan-fried, deep fried, or pressure fried
Fried chicken, more formally known as 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".
History
The expression "fried chicken" was first recorded in the 1830s, and frequently appears in American cookbooks of the 1860s and 1870s. The origin of fried chicken in the southern states of America has been traced to precedents in Scottish and West African cuisine. Scottish fried chicken was battered with seasonings and deep fried in lard and West African fried chicken added different seasonings, and was battered and cooked in palm oil.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fried chicken” as dish consisting of chicken pieces which have been coated in a seasoned batter and pan-fried, deep fried, or pressure fried. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as dish consisting of chicken pieces which have been coated in a seasoned batter and pan-fried, deep fried, or pressure fried. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1065241. The Library of Congress control number is sh2018000865. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1747, 1773 and 1736.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fried chicken” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.