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Roast Fowl
The dressing for roasted fowl should be of bread toasted crisp, spread with butter, and moistened with water; or if plain dressing, pound in a mortar. It should be rather highly seasoned. Add if you like, sage, thyme and parsley, and have the whole soft enough so it will fill the cavity compactly. The giblets, chopped fine, should always be served with the gravy.
This is a dressing formula rather than a full roasting method, and it assumes a cook who already knows how long a bird takes. The points below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- "Fowl" is not a young chicken"Fowl" is not necessarily a young chicken -- in older cookbooks a fowl is often a mature bird, tougher and stronger in flavour than a modern roasting chicken. The recipe gives no weight and no roasting time, so judge doneness by temperature.
- The toasted-bread methodCrisping the bread before buttering and moistening is the whole point: dry toast absorbs the butter and liquid without collapsing into paste. Use a firm white loaf, toast it hard, then tear rather than cube it.
- Water, or something betterThe original moistens with water. Warm chicken stock or the giblet cooking liquid gives the same texture with considerably more flavour.
- "Pound in a mortar"This applies to the plain, untoasted version, where stale bread is reduced to crumbs by hand. A few pulses in a food processor does the same work; stop while there is still some texture.
- "Rather highly seasoned"Take this at face value. Dressing is diluted by the bird and by the gravy, and under-seasoned stuffing is the usual fault. Season the mixture until it tastes slightly too salty on its own.
- Herb quantitiesNone are given. For a 5 lb bird, roughly 1 teaspoon dried sage, 1 teaspoon dried thyme and 2 tablespoons chopped parsley suits the proportions; sage dominates quickly, so add it last.
- Filling the cavity "compactly"Modern practice runs the other way. Pack loosely, because stuffing inside a bird must reach 165F to be safe, and a tightly packed cavity will not get there before the breast is dry. Baking the surplus in a dish alongside is the simpler course.
- The gibletsSimmer heart, gizzard and neck in water with an onion for about an hour, chop them fine and stir into the gravy with some of their liquid. The liver cooks in minutes and turns bitter if boiled with the rest; add it separately at the end or leave it out.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Make enough to fill the cavity, and bake any surplus alongside.
Bread dressing bound with butter and seasoned with sage is a long-established English-American preparation, and the sage-and-onion pairing for poultry and pork is documented in English cookery well before the nineteenth century, though this recipe calls for no onion. The distinction this recipe draws between toasted bread and bread "pounded in a mortar" suggests a household that baked its own loaves and had stale bread to use up rather than a bag of prepared crumbs; the mortar was still standard kitchen equipment. The brisk instruction that giblets "should always be served with the gravy" seems to belong to the same economy - a bird was likely bought or killed whole, and nothing edible set aside.