Remove the skin from the chicken if your husband does not like it. Soak the chicken in water. I add salt if I am using frozen chicken, but you may not want to. When the chicken is thoroughly thawed and warm, remove it from the water, and quickly put it in a bed of flour. Nothing else! Leave it there for a few seconds.
Remove the chicken, after it's floured on all sides, and lay it on a piece of waxed paper. Leave it there for at least thirty minutes. This will form a seal, and looks as though you had put glue on the chicken. It will not look too appetizing. Never mind. This is exactly what you want. It is *most important* to let the chicken sit thirty minutes after flouring. This odd-looking batter (and it won't look like batter at all, but a real mess ) will form a coating on the chicken that I find seals in the juices, and keeps the grease *out* when frying. Really it does.
One day, all my neighbors came in and we fried over fifty chicken breasts in different kinds of oils, grease, and shortenings. We used deep fryers, stainless steel, aluminum, and an old cast iron skillet. The comparisons were amazing. All agreed that nothing could beat that old cast iron skillet. Seems as if the heat spreads slowly through the cast iron. Place your chicken in hot shortening about one inch deep and *immediately* put the lid on! Have the fire on medium heat. Never cook chicken too fast. It gets brown on the outside before the inside gets a chance to cook. When the chicken is golden brown on one side, turn each piece over *once* We found that turning chicken pieces over more than once made it greasy.
When the chicken is done (especially if you are frying a lot of it ) place it in a pressure cooker (with the grate in ) to keep it warm until you are finished frying all of it. As you remove it from your frying pan, place it in a big Dutch over, or the pressure cooker, and *then and only* then, salt it.
You will find that you have the most beautiful crust on your chicken that you have ever seen on home-fried chicken! You will not know that the skin has been removed. Most people remove the skin to get rid of fat particles - That's the reason I do.
And ladies, I am going to let you in on a secret that we discovered at that neighborhood chicken-fry. Now that it's tried and tested, I will pass it on.
We found that when using shortening to fry chicken if you put a few drops of yellow cake-coloring in the shortening after the shortening heats, it will give your chicken the most beautiful color you have ever seen! Truly! It's a golden yellow, and looks as if it has been fried in pure butter! Cake coloring is cheap. Buy some and try it. Get the small bottles with different colors. The cost about twenty-five cents for four colors, and can be used for many things.
As I said, my neighbors and I tried all the batter recipes, egg dips, buttermilk, etc ... and none was as good as plain old water soak, dipping quickly in pure flour, and set aside for thirty minutes. Don't shake the water off the chicken before dipping it into the flour. You need this to form the "seal" to keep the juices in and the grease out. And don't ask me what we did with all that fried chicken. All the neighbors had chicken for dinner, lunches the next day, and right now we are sick of chicken. But we sure found out there were differences in methods of chicken-frying!"
There, that ought to do it for you! And so nostalgic, too! I've done this, and just about the same thing with cubed steaks and pork chops - Heloise and all her neighbors were right