This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
“Can I talk to you about breaded chicken for an article on traditional festive Spanish food?” The journalist’s question surprised me. I have never thought of the dish as either festive or traditional — or even particularly palatable since its corruption under the influence of the greasy, gargantuan slabs that issue in revolting “buckets” from uniformly Americanised outlets, like deadly monsters, spilling and crawling from alien spacecraft.
The genuinely traditional fried chicken recipe in Spain is for pollo al ajillo — jointed and swirled in garlic-rich olive oil. Until factory-farming — another intrusion from the US — began to plump up chickens in the 1950s, the meat was usually too scrawny for quick cooking of any kind.
Longstanding Spanish methods of treating it involved slow braising or stewing, typically with abundant vegetables and salty bacon or spicy bits of sausage. Tender young birds or capons, roasted over naked flames, were treats too expensive for any but the most special occasions.
In 1948, America’s “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest deployed soulless science and pitiless technology to produce a “superior meat-type chicken”. Contestants treated animals like machines — anonymous units on a conveyor belt, with processed feed at one end and barely edible outcomes at the other.
You can still see the horror enacted in old news-theatre documentaries on the internet, including an unconvincingly folksy, Texaco-funded, barely disguised propaganda film, which attributes the successful industrialisation of chickens to the speedy deliveries the petroleum industry provided.
A supermarket chain’s rival reel depicts surgically eviscerated carcases, gaping like the corpses of pallid monsters hoisted on grim gallows, whilst the “Del-Mar Chicken of Tomorrow Queen, Nancy Magee of Berlin, Maryland” parades under her crown in the grotesque simulacrum of a chariot, surrounded by girl attendants.
In successive years, in combination with “growth vitamins”, launched in 1948, and antibiotic feed from 1950, more contests drove chickens towards ergonomically minimal spaces, where 40,000-broiler factories strained sensibilities and supplied stomachs.
When Spaniards started coating chicken for frying, the model was Italian
Amongst the results were chicken breasts the size of veal escalopes.
When Spaniards started coating chicken for frying, therefore, the influential model was Italian — the cotoletta alla milanese. Today, almost everywhere, except Milan and Vienna, chicken is displacing the veal that once hid inside the crisp, light coating.
The “Southern Fried” variant is inferior in flavour, texture and aroma and much harder to cook. Because it originated amongst poor blacks, whose backyard chickens or pigs were the only meat they ate (unless they could grab a passing opossum, the subject of an earlier column), recipes start with marinading, originally to soften tough muscles.
The style of jointing the birds in large lumps impedes consistent cooking, except in the sickeningly deep fat of the Deep South. The thickness of the slabs makes cooking time hard to calculate, leaving the innermost recesses, all too often, raw or dismally dry.
The stodgy padding of flour — originally a way of eking out unsustaining portions — bundles the chicken in cladding as heavy as a British Warm and chewy as a Gannex Mac.
Lard and palm oil flow recklessly, inches thick, into deep pans — evoking respectively the poverty of the plantation and the stickiness of the West African forest. Neither has, to me, a pleasant flavour, whilst common substitutes — peanut and sunflower oil — are, at best, neutral. Thighs, the fattest part of the bird, aggravate the grease.
A tender alternative — benign to prepare, behold, scent and taste — is attainable with a shallow pan and a dab of olive oil. If one starts with a generous cut off the breast, of the size of a modest Wiener schnitzel, marinading for an hour or so can help: in sweet wine or sherry mingled with emollient blobs of olive oil, it enhances flavour and keeps the meat moist. Filmed with lightly beaten egg, rather than smothered in floury paste, the slice needs to be well covered with crusty breadcrumbs.
The wise cook includes a dash of sweet paprika with a pinch of brown sugar for colour, crushed, toasted hazelnuts for crunch and plenty of salt, pepper, finely chopped garlic, tarragon and parsley for flavour.
Grease-fiends who tell you that deep fat is necessary are as false as the techno-geeks who try to sell air fryers. A few fairly fierce minutes in a broad, shallow pan finish a perfectly gilded dish.
Because the cooking yields no sauce and needs nothing unctuous or American, the best garnish is juicy, colourful and Mediterranean: ratatouille, say, or stewed datterini, or creamed spinach, studded with raisins as big and dark as a moonless night.
