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Fricasseed Chicken
Stuff the chicken as if to boil; put in a pot, but do not quite cover with water; put on two hours before dinner; chop a small onion, some parsley, and very little mace; rub a piece of butter size of a walnut with flour and stir it all in. Before dishing, beat yolks of three eggs and stir in carefully; cook four or five minutes.
A stewed fricassee finished with an egg-yolk liaison, written for a mature fowl that needed two hours of gentle simmering. The finish is where it can go wrong.
- The hinge: the egg yolksOnce the yolks go in, the liquid must never boil or it will curdle into scrambled threads. Take the pot off the heat, temper the beaten yolks with a ladleful of the hot broth, stir them back in, and return it to the lowest heat for the four or five minutes given.
- Two hours is for an old birdTwo hours suits an old bird -- the timing points to a mature fowl with plenty of connective tissue. A modern 4-5 lb chicken is generally tender in 60-75 minutes at a bare simmer, and two hours is likely to leave the breast dry and stringy.
- DonenessCook until the thigh joint reads 165F, and if the bird is stuffed, check the centre of the stuffing at 165F as well. Stuffing inside a simmered bird heats slowly, so test it rather than going by the clock.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Rubbed with roughly the same volume of flour it makes a beurre manié, stirred into the broth to thicken it.
- MaceGround mace is the outer coat of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. "Very little" means about 1/8 teaspoon; it turns soapy and medicinal fast. Whole blade mace fished out before serving is easier to control.
- Do not quite cover with waterMost likely to keep the broth concentrated enough to make the sauce without reducing it later, with the breast sitting above the liquid. The recipe gives no instruction about a lid.
- Stuffed "as if to boil"Stuffed 'as if to boil' -- in books of this period that usually means a bread-based dressing seasoned with salt, pepper and herbs, secured in the cavity. The recipe itself gives no details.
- Yield and servingA 4-5 lb bird would serve about four. Carve into joints, arrange on a warm platter and pour the thickened sauce over; rice, mashed potato or dumplings are common accompaniments.
Fricassee came into English kitchens from French cookery -- the word is recorded in English from the sixteenth century -- and means a dish of meat cut up and stewed in its own liquid, thickened and served in the sauce rather than browned first as for a saute. In American nineteenth-century books it was often a way of dealing with an old laying hen, whose flesh is too tough to roast but makes excellent broth; the long slow simmer and the egg-and-butter thickening turn that broth into something worth eating. The egg-yolk liaison is an old sauce technique in European cooking, predating the roux. The instruction "put on two hours before dinner" is also a reminder that these recipes were written for cooks working to a fixed midday or early-evening dinner hour, timing backward from the table rather than forward from the stove.