It was at the beloved Northwest Arkansas poultry establishment AQ Chicken House—now tragically closed but reopening in 2025—that I was first at a loss for something to say about fried chicken. As my now-husband, who is not only not Southern but not from the United States, perused the menu, he looked up in bewilderment. “I see fried chicken and something called chicken-fried chicken. What even is that?”
Instinctively, I knew the chicken-fried chicken would arrive boneless and flattened and likely smothered in white gravy. But why? “There’s something called chicken-fried steak that’s fried like a chicken, and the chicken-fried chicken looks like the steak…”
Let me save you from such incoherence:
It all started with classic fried chicken. You know it, you love it, and you have the Scots to thank for it, as they likely brought the dish to the American South in the seventeenth century. In 1824, a standard-setting recipe appeared in the first regional American cookbook, The Virginia House-Wife, written by Mary Randolph, a white woman from a slaveholding family. That chicken was to be dredged in flour, sprinkled with salt, and put in boiling lard, and it reflected what African Americans—the people doing the actual cooking—were making. “With years of honed experience, as well as an adeptness at seasoning and frying, African American cooks caused fried chicken to lose its Scottish identity and it became as quintessentially ‘Southern’ as black-eyed peas, cornbread, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and sweet potato pie,” writes food historian Adrian Miller.
What you can do to a chicken, you can do to a steak. In the first half of the nineteenth century—after the popularity of fried chicken had exploded—chicken-fried steak was born in Texas. Still today, the state sells a heart-attack-inducing 800,000 of them a day, according to the Texas Restaurant Association. Its origin stories vary; it’s possible the dish comes from German and Swiss immigrants and their schnitzel tradition, or as a way to make cheaper cuts of meat more palatable. The best story, which is potentially totally made up, is that a hapless short-order cook took a waitress’s note of “chicken, fried steak” to be one order, grabbed a steak, and fried it like a chicken, to applaudable results. But everyone can agree generally upon the preparation: Pound out a cube steak or a cheap cut like round steak with a mallet, bread it in flour, and fry it in oil.
Chicken-fried chicken, then, works backwards: It’s a chicken that is prepared like a chicken-fried steak—that is, it’s boneless and pounded flat. Like chicken-fried steak, it usually comes with white pepper or another gravy. There isn’t much information on that dish’s origin, but it’s safe to say it came after chicken-fried steak, and that whoever named it was either very literal or very meta, or just had a sense of humor.
