Okay, I'm in one of those moods. Now I'm gonna talk about my mother's fried chicken recipe.
You're gonna need some chicken. And some bacon grease--like, a lot, enough to put a 1/8" to 1/4" layer in the pan once it's melted, which is going to be around a cup, maybe more, for a 10" frying pan, and for bigger frying pans you will need more than that. And one egg, and some flour, and salt and pepper. And a cup of water. And a big frying pan with a tight-fitting lid. And a big mixing bowl of some kind.
Wash the pieces of chicken. Sprinkle them with lots of salt and pepper. Let them stand while you beat an egg and sift about half a cup of flour, more or less, depending on how much chicken you want to cook, and put a little of the sifted flour in the bottom of the mixing bowl. Get the bacon grease heating up in that pan. While it's heating up, go back to the chicken.
Coat the chicken with flour. Be very thorough. Put the pieces of chicken in the bowl with the flour and sprinkle more flour on them. Dip them in beaten egg. Roll them in more flour. All the pieces of chicken should be very completely coated with beaten egg and flour.
As the bacon fat comes up to frying temperature, start putting the chicken in the pan. It's been a lot of years since I watched my mother do this, and I don't remember the details, but a guy named Alton Brown had some recommendations that make sense to me. You're going to put the chicken in skin side down, for those pieces where there is a distinction of one side having a lot more skin than the other, to start, and you're going to put the thighs in the middle, because they are dark meat, which will take the longest and require the highest heat to cook them. Other pieces can go to the edges of the pan. They are going to need to cook until you get a nice golden brown texture on the bottom side, and you see lots of moisture appearing on the tops. This is going to vary with your stove, the size of your pan, the sizes of the chicken pieces, the exact composition of the bacon grease, and so on, so be watchful. Typically this is 10-15 minutes. Turn them over. Brown them on the other side. This will take about the same amount of time.
Next step, and this is something my mother learned from relatives who lived through the Great Depression, and remembered having nothing to cook but tough old hens that were so old they'd stopped laying eggs. They could also have told you stories about cooking snapping turtle, and muskrat, and raccoon, and skunk, and anything else their husbands could bring in. Anyway, my mother was taught to do something that makes those chickens edible and makes ordinary supermarket chicken moist and tender. Slowly pour in that cup of water and bring it to a boil. With all the heat a big cast iron pan holds, it doesn't normally take long and may even boil within seconds of adding it. Turn the heat way, way down to simmer. Put the lid on the frying pan and wait 45 minutes to one hour, during which the chicken will steam and most of the water will evaporate. Put the chicken on stacked paper towels to absorb some of the grease and serve.
And, because I'm feeling magnanimous, now I'm going to talk about my mother's recipe for gravy to be served with mashed potatoes that accompany the chicken. Foodies and culinary arts students are going to recognize this as a variation on bechamel sauces.
After you remove the chicken from the pan, there will be lots of dark bits in there, and a lot of the original bacon grease. Heat the pan up again and add some more flour, half a cup or more. Use a wooden spoon to mix it vigorously with the grease in the pan to make a roux. Brown the roux. Cook it until you see it darken. It will begin to smell like frying pancakes. Add a pint of milk, or more, to the roux, a bit at a time, mixing it thoroughly with that wooden spoon. Add salt and pepper to taste, and for Mom, this was "lots and lots." Bring the milk mixture to a boil, stirring rapidly with that wooden spoon, and boil it until it begins to thicken. This is the way she made gravy when she made fried chicken. A meal would typically be chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a vegetable. She was extremely enthusiastic about canned green beans. On special occasions it might be corn on the cob.