invention of fried chicken?

[steeljaw]

My friend and I are having a debate, and since I have this vast resource of useful(useless) information at my fingertips, I hope to soon find out that I am in the right.

Question is: When was fried chicken invented? I don’t need a day and time or anything, just perhaps the year. Actually, the correct century will be sufficient.

[sub]is that KFC I smell?[/sub]

[Terminus_Est]

You might as well ask: When was frying invented? From there, it’s just a short step to dumping chicken parts into hot oil. A quick Google search on “history frying” leads to http://www.intheweedz.com/food_history.htm

Cookery originated sometime between the onset of fire making and the beginning, eons later, of the Neolithic period. Until they learned to make and control fire, early humans ate their food raw, subsisting mostly on wild fruits, nuts, insects, fish, and game. Before the development of pottery vessels some 7000 to 12,000 years ago, food was cooked by roasting it over or toasting it beside open fires, or by wrapping it in leaves or husks, to be pit-steamed over embers. The development of pottery made possible such relatively sophisticated cooking methods as boiling, stewing, braising, frying, and, perhaps, a primitive form of baking. These techniques, in combination with the domestication of animals for their meat and milk and the cultivation of edible plants, opened the way to what ultimately became modern cookery.

This site says that chickens were probably domesticated at least 8,000 years ago. People were probably cooking wild jungle fowl a long time before that.

So, to answer your question, my WAG is that fried chicken was invented in 8000 BC, give or take a few thousand years.

[Starbury]

I’m assuming you’re talking about battered fried chicken, with flour and spices and all that, rather than just dropping a chicken into a vat of boiling oil. So 8000 B.C. is probably too early for that.

The best I could come up with is that fried chicken originated either in the Southern states of the U.S. or in Maryland. It seems that fried chicken became popular in the south around the late 1800’s/early 1900’s. So its invention would, if that’s correct, have to be before the 20th century.