Chicken Fried Steak Refers To How Steak Is Cooked. No Chickens Are Involved!

Feeling a little bit hungry for some southern home cookin’? Then this is the perfect day!

National Chicken Fried Steak Day offers a great opportunity to appreciate and enjoy this classic, hearty dish with a few different southern sides.

• 1830s – It’s likely that the German tradition of making wiener schnitzel was a strong influence on the more recent invention of Chicken Fried Steak.
• 1838 – The Virginia Housewife published a cookbook, by Mary Randolph, that contains one of the earliest recipes similar to Chicken Fried Steak, but it is made with veal cutlets.
• 1911 – ​Jimmy Don Perkins, a short-order cook in Lamesa, Texas, accidentally creates chicken fried steak by mixing up a chicken order and a steak order (or so one of the stories goes).
• 1924 – The recipe for chicken fried steak appears in print for the first time in ​The Los Angeles Times
• 1930s –  virtually all print references to chicken-fried steak involved restaurants, the first printed recipe for “chicken-fried steak” that I can find appeared in 1935, in the Omaha World-Herald‘s cooking column.
• 1942 – The National Restaurant Association compiles a list of the top 10 favorite American restaurant dishes and Chicken Fried Steak with country gravy ranks at #3
• 1953 – Jack Woodman of the New York Times filed a travel piece about touring the Intermountain West that highlighted the dish’s lowbrow reputation. “This is hardly a land for gourmets,” he wrote. “To be brutally frank, you won’t starve in the Intermountain West but you may tire of the region’s omnipresent ‘chicken fried steak.'”
• 1977 – the New York Times identified a trend of “reverse chic,” in which anything that the elites considered unfashionable suddenly became cool. “Jimmy Carter did not begin it,” the paper noted, “although in a way he legitimized it.”
• 1988 – Officially approved by the state legislature, Oklahoma’s state meal includes Chicken Fried Steak, black-eyed peas, fried okra, cornbread, pecan pie and several other items.
• 2011 – ​the Texas State House of Representatives declared October 26 “Chicken Fried Steak Day,” noting that “this signature dish occupies a special place in the culinary culture of the Lone Star State.”
• 2017 – To make the day even more special, Jimmy Baldwin wrote a little song about this delicious food, and the song was officially endorsed by the state of Texas in 2017. The title is “Peace, Love, and Chicken Fried Steak.” and the chorus goes like this:
  • A whole lotta hate going on
  • A whole lotta hate
  • We’ve gotta learn to love one another
  • White, Black and Brown,
  • We’re all just brothers
  • Well, I’m no guru, but
  • I know what it will take
  • All it takes is some chicken fried steak.
  • Peace, love and chicken fried steak
  • Peace, love and chicken fried steak
  • That’s what the world needs now
• The name refers to how the steak is cooked since, depending on the recipe, the steak is treated similarly to cooking fried chicken with flour, bread crumbs or batter coating.
• What is the difference between country-fried vs. chicken fried steak? Although the two recipes are very similar, country fried steak is cooked with a flour coating and served with a deep brown gravy while chicken fried steak is dipped in egg, fried and accompanied with cream gravy on top and mashed potatoes on the side.
• Chicken Fried Steak (CFS for short) is thinly pounded-out beef.

Sources:

National Today

Days of the Year

Serious Eats