9 Old-School Southern Chicken Dishes That Need To Make A Comeback

When most Americans think of Southern cuisine, one of the first dishes that comes to mind is fried chicken. And it's no wonder — the iconic favorite has been a point of pride for both Black and white Southern cooks as early as the 17th century, since chickens were among the first domesticated animals to become established in the American South. But fried chicken was labor-intensive and pricey to make in the pre-industrial era — the cook had to slaughter a valuable chicken from their flock, clean it, and carve it into pieces for cooking, then undertake the hot, messy work of coating and frying it. This all meant that it was originally a special-occasion dish, reserved for holidays and for church gatherings.

Frying wasn't the only way Southern cooks prepared chicken, though. They also developed dozens of simpler but still flavorful recipes, often meant to feed a crowd. While fried chicken was best made with tender, younger birds, many of these recipes taste just as good made with older, tougher chickens. While these humble (and often homely-looking) old-school dishes never gained the mainstream appeal of fried chicken, they still have pockets of fiercely loyal fans in certain parts of the South, and are more than worthy of a place on your table.

A classic dish with roots in either Savannah, Georgia or Charleston, North Carolina (depending who you ask), country captain is a bright, flavorful stew of chicken sautéed in bacon fat, simmered with tomatoes, and flavored with curry powder, onions, and hot and bell peppers. It's also a bit of local history on a plate: Both Savannah and Charleston are coastal towns whose ports were once important trading centers, and the presence of curry points to the influence of the British spice trade and the local availability of spices from India. By tradition, the dish is served over rice. This is not only a nod to Indian culinary culture, but to Lowcountry Southerners' fondness for rice, which grows well in the region.

With its bright colors and touch of heat and spice, country captain will fit in well on modern tables — it's filling, but not at all stodgy. Even better, it's traditionally served with an assortment of condiments to be added at the table, which can include currants, grated coconut, chopped peanuts, sliced scallions, and green apple or mango chutney. This lets diners choose their own adventure. Everyone is free to create a version of their own to enjoy. And no, nobody really knows where its strange name came from. One possibility is that the dish was introduced to the South by a British sea captain, but another plausible account is that it was named for the captains of Indian trading ships, who were called country captains.

It's a shame when good dishes get saddled with depressing names. Take, for instance, the old Lowcountry favorite, chicken bog. It's a good bet that most modern eaters, seeing that dish on a menu with no explanation or context, would give it a hard pass. But if it were rebranded (quite accurately) as Lowcountry chicken risotto, we'd happily take a big plateful and hand over our money. A soft savory mixture of creamy rice, shredded or chopped chicken, and smoky sausage, it's perfect comfort food on a cold night when you feel you need some extra cheer — or calories. Chicken bog's unfortunate name comes from the wet texture of the dish, which is supposed to be more soupy than fluffy.

While virtually unknown in most parts of the country, chicken bog continues to be a favorite in the rice-growing Lowcountry regions of coastal Georgia and the Carolinas. It was a traditional meal at fish camps, where hungry fishermen would return from the water to be greeted by big iron pots of chicken bog. And while it's not a fast dish to make, it's fairly easy even if you have limited cooking skills or equipment: Just cook chicken and aromatics, such as onions and celery, in water to form a broth, and cool and shred the chicken. Then, cook the rice, sausage, and some sautéed vegetables in the chicken broth, then stir in the chicken and continue to cook until the rice is tender.

Once a typical dish of the rural South, chicken and dumplings rarely appears on modern tables. This is our loss, because despite its reputation as dowdy, poverty food, it was popular in its day for good reason — this saucy dish of rich gravy and tender chicken with biscuit-dough dumplings simmered alongside the chicken was a satisfying one-pot meal and a tasty and affordable way to feed a big family with a single chicken. While it's been a longtime favorite in the South, though, its roots may go back even further. Some scholars believe it's a direct descendant of the traditional meat-and-dumpling stews of Eastern European and German cuisine, brought to the U.S. by settlers from these regions.

While it's a modest and visually homely dish, some modern Southern chefs are giving it a second look, making refined versions from herb-roasted free-range chickens, instead of a long-boiled tough old rooster, and enriching the sauce with butter and heavy cream for extra oomph. Home cooks have long taken their own liberties with the dish — dumplings can be anything from fluffy biscuit balls floating on top of the sauce to thick, noodle-like strips that soak the sauce up. If you're curious to try chicken and dumplings but are short on time, many modern cooks take an easy shortcut by making their dumplings from canned biscuit dough.

A close cousin of jambalaya, chicken perloo is another old Lowcountry favorite featuring chicken and rice. It differs from chicken bog in several key ways: It's sometimes drier and fluffier in consistency, comes with whole, cut-up chicken pieces rather than shredded chicken, and contains more spices and seasonings, including tomatoes, sausages, garlic, peppers, and paprika. To amp up the flavor even more, some cooks make it with smoked chicken.

The popularity of chicken-and-rice combos in the Lowcountry is no accident. As Emily Meggett, author of Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, explained to The Apopka Chief, "Many of the one-pot rice dishes in the Lowcountry and the South can trace their origins back to west Africa." Meggett traces chicken perloo's influences to both traditional West African dishes like jollof rice and European dishes like paella. So if you're in the mood for something bright, filling, and with a history as complex and spicy as its flavor, give chicken perloo a try.

A specialty of northeast Georgia and the western Carolinas, chicken mull is yet another old-school favorite with a weirdly unappealing name. And if you see a bowl of it for the first time, you may find it doesn't look very appealing either. A cross between a soup and a stew, it's basically ground, cooked chicken simmered in milk and broth and thickened with crumbled saltine crackers. It may have been developed as a way to tenderize tough old chickens, but it evolved into an economical way to feed a crowd. Because the recipe is easy to scale up, cooks have become adept at preparing huge pots of it to serve at events like church fundraisers, while in small batches, it makes a cozy winter supper or lunch dish.

Unglamorous as chicken mull may be, those who know it can't get enough of it. Bear Grass, North Carolina, even hosts its own Chicken Mull Festival to celebrate its version of the dish, which locals historically cooked over open fires in big wash pots and stirred with boat paddles (the chefs kept dedicated stirring paddles separate from their actual rowing paddles). Despite chicken mull's homely looks and humble ingredients, specialist chefs are beyond serious about their recipes and technique, with some insisting that only specific brands of saltines or seasoning mix will do. Don't even think about getting cooking tips from them, either — their exact recipes and cooking times are often closely guarded secrets.

It's no secret why some regional dishes attain mainstream popularity while others don't. Some local specialties, beloved as they are by locals, are just too unglamorous, unphotogenic, or geared to local tastes or ingredients to ever become trendy. But this is all the more reason why intrepid cooks and eaters should try them: Not only do they give you a window into a regional culture, but they may become welcome additions to your weekly meal rotation.

One example of an under-the-radar Southern chicken dish is Shoals chicken stew, a specialty of a region in north Alabama, encompassing Muscle Shoals, Florence, and Tuscumbia. It's a colorful dish of shredded chicken simmered with tomatoes, chunks of potato and onion, corn, lima beans, and green beans. Thought by some locals to have German origins, the stew is popular both with home cooks and with community groups, who cook it up in enormous pots to sell for fundraisers. The stew sometimes gets a unique alternate presentation, being served between two slices of bread as a sandwich filling. This was originally an innovation created for a young girl who didn't have enough money for a full serving of stew.

A long-forgotten Southern favorite, chicken pudding had its heyday in the 18th century, when it was a popular dish in the area that would soon become the Southern states of the U.S. Don't let the name of the dish put you off. This is not a sweet dish, or even a pudding by most modern definitions. Rather, it's a cross between a quiche and a frittata, with shredded, cooked chicken baked in a savory egg custard until set.

A possible reason for its popularity is that it's an easy dish to make. The custard batter is made from a butter and flour roux mixed into eggs and milk or stock and seasoned with salt and pepper, with some recipes including dried herbs like thyme and parsley. The mixture is then poured over cooked chicken in a casserole or pie tin and baked. To make it more substantial, you can serve it with a light and easy chicken gravy.

The recipes that evoke the most nostalgia among eaters are rarely the fanciest. Rather, they're the everyday comfort foods we associate with our parents' and grandparents' kitchens — in short, with safety and unconditional love. Very often, these are among the simplest and least glamorous dishes. Dependable standbys a busy home cook can throw together and put on the table with minimum effort. In many Southern households, one such dish has traditionally been chicken and rice casserole.

Unlike other dishes in the South's seemingly endless pantheon of chicken and rice combos, chicken and rice casserole (baked chicken on a bed of rice and vegetables in a creamy sauce) is a relatively recent innovation. It was first popularized by the Campbell's Soup company, which introduced a recipe for the dish sometime in the 1940s, after it launched a test kitchen to develop recipes using its soups. The Campbell's recipe called for nothing more than canned cream of mushroom soup and water stirred into a baking pan of raw rice and chicken, then baked. The speedy dish soon became a favorite, but experienced home cooks realized it wouldn't take much more work to make it even better. They added extra ingredients to liven it up, creating dishes like cheesy chicken and rice casserole, or developed their own, from-scratch versions, swapping the instant soup for cream and broth, and adding herbs and vegetables for extra color and flavor.

An ultra-comforting soul food classic, smothered chicken is simply chicken pieces (preferably dark meat) slow-braised on a stovetop in a rich gravy. It's an old dish. An early written recipe dates to an 1839 cookbook, "The Kentucky Housewife," which suggests cooks made it even before that. The exact origins of smothered chicken are unclear, but Creole or Cajun roots are likely — the French word for "smothered" is étouffée, which is also the name of a saucy Cajun dish.

Part of the appeal of smothered chicken is that you can flavor it any way you like. Cooks and families all have their own favorite versions, with some people happily changing theirs up depending on their mood and what's in their refrigerators. The basic formula is to season and brown chicken pieces, and sauté vegetables (which can include onions, peppers, mushrooms, or celery) in the same pan. Then make a roux in that pan, add a braising liquid, and return the chicken to the pot to cook. The braising liquid can be broth, beer, or wine, and additional seasonings can include herbs and spices like smoked paprika.