Chicken pieces seasoned, coated in seasoned flour, and deep-fried — a dish with deep roots in Scottish and West African cooking traditions, central to American Southern cuisine.
Two traditions converging
Fried chicken’s American form emerged from two distinct cultural inputs: Scottish immigrants brought the tradition of frying chicken in fat (rather than baking or stewing, as was common in England); West African enslaved people brought the technique of heavily seasoning and frying chicken in oil — a cooking tradition from across West Africa. The fusion, developed in the American South, produced what became one of the world’s most replicated dishes.
Buttermilk brine
The Southern technique calls for soaking chicken pieces in buttermilk for 4–24 hours before frying. The lactic acid tenderises the meat; the buttermilk provides the moisture for the crust to adhere. When the flour coating meets the hot fat, the buttermilk creates steam from within, keeping the meat juicy.
Nashville Hot Chicken
Nashville’s variant, said to originate at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in the 1930s, coats the fried chicken in a paste of cayenne, brown sugar, garlic, and lard after frying, producing a fiery lacquered exterior. It has become a national American food trend since the 2010s.
Global spread
KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), founded by Harland Sanders in 1952, industrialised the American recipe and spread it worldwide. Fried chicken has since developed distinct national traditions: Japanese karaage (soy-ginger marinated, potato starch coated), Korean double-fried yangnyeom chicken, and Filipino pritong manok.