Cut a fat chicken into pieces at the joints; season with all kinds of condiments; then put in a deep saucepan. Add some chopped ham, a few sliced bamboo sprouts, 1 chopped onion and a handful of walnuts. Cover with hot water and let stew slowly until tender. Add some Chinese sauce and parsley. Serve with shredded pineapple.
A one-pot chicken stew filtered through an American idea of Chinese cooking around the turn of the last century. The instructions are skeletal, so most of the work is deciding quantities.
- "A fat chicken"A 4-5 lb roasting bird, cut into eight or ten pieces through the joints. Poultry then was older and fattier than a supermarket broiler; if using a lean 3.5 lb chicken, keep the skin on and do not stew it past 45 minutes or the breast will dry out.
- "All kinds of condiments"Period shorthand for salt, pepper, and whatever aromatic seasonings the cook favoured. Salt, white pepper, a little ground ginger and a crushed clove of garlic is a defensible reading; the recipe assumes you will taste and adjust.
- "Chinese sauce"Almost certainly soy sauce, which was sold in American groceries under that name and as "India soy". Two to three tablespoons stirred in near the end is enough for a stew this size. Add it late, as directed, because prolonged boiling flattens its aroma and concentrates the salt.
- Bamboo sproutsCanned bamboo shoots, drained and rinsed; fresh ones must be boiled at length, which removes bitterness and also destroys the cyanogenic compounds raw shoots contain, and are rarely worth sourcing. Add them in the last 15 minutes so they keep some snap.
- WalnutsA handful is roughly 1/2 cup, shelled halves. They soften completely if stewed the whole time. Toasting them and adding them at the end preserves both texture and flavour.
- The stew itself"Cover with hot water" gives a thin, brothy result rather than a sauce. Use just enough liquid to come three-quarters up the chicken, and if you want it to coat, lift the meat out and reduce the liquid hard for a few minutes.
- TimingSlow simmer, lid ajar, 40-50 minutes for a young bird and up to 90 for an old fowl. Never let it boil hard, which toughens the meat and clouds the broth.
- The pineappleShredded fresh pineapple served alongside, not cooked in. Canned crushed pineapple, well drained, is a reasonable stand-in; canned pineapple was widely sold in America by this period.
- YieldServes four to five with rice, though the recipe does not mention rice.
Books of the "dishes of all nations" type were a staple of American publishing in the first decades of the twentieth century, offering a different country for each day of the year and rarely troubling with authenticity. This is a stew from that tradition: a roster of ingredients coded as Chinese to an English-speaking reader of the period bamboo shoots, walnuts, soy sauce, pineapple assembled by an entirely European method of joint, season, cover with water, simmer. Bottled soy had been available in American cities since the late nineteenth century, imported for Chinese communities and then picked up by the mainstream cookery press during the chop suey vogue. The pineapple is the tell: sweet fruit served with savoury meat was a marker of the exotic in Anglo-American cooking of the day.