Cut a fat hen into pieces at the joints and boil until tender; season and fry with 1 onion and 2 green peppers chopped fine. Add 1 cup of tomato-sauce, salt and pepper to taste. Serve the chicken on a platter with boiled rice.
April 11 — No. 11
Spanish
A two-stage chicken dish — poach, then fry, then sauce — that assumes a tough old bird and a cook with plenty of time. Both assumptions can be adjusted.
- "A fat hen"A stewing hen was a spent layer past her laying life, with dense flesh that needed an hour or more of simmering. A supermarket chicken of 3-4 lb is tender in 30-35 minutes, so "boil until tender" is a much shorter job than the original writer had in mind; poach only until the joints loosen, then stop, or the breast will shred.
- Save the brothThe recipe says nothing about the poaching liquid. Poach the bird in just enough water to cover, with an onion half and a bay leaf, and keep the liquid — a few spoonfuls loosen the tomato sauce at the end.
- Dry before fryingBoiled chicken carries surface water and will steam rather than brown. Pat the pieces thoroughly dry and fry in hot oil or lard, skin side down first, in a pan wide enough that they are not crowded.
- Order of the panAs written, chicken, onion and peppers all go in together. The vegetables cook faster than the chicken browns. Brown the chicken, lift it out, soften the onion and peppers in the same fat for 8-10 minutes, then return the chicken and add the sauce.
- Green peppersAt this period this meant an ordinary sweet bell pepper, unripe and green. Two modern bells give roughly 2 cups chopped. If you want something closer to Spanish practice, use one green bell and one frying pepper such as cubanelle.
- Tomato-sauceNot the sweetened pasta sauce of today but a plain cooked tomato purée. A cup of canned crushed tomatoes or passata, simmered 10 minutes with the vegetables, is the right thing.
- YieldA whole bird with rice serves four. Allow about 1 1/2 cups raw long-grain rice, boiled plain and drained, as the platter base.
Books of this type — a dish a day, each pinned to a nation — were a recognisable if narrow publishing genre in the early twentieth century, when "of all nations" meant a stripe of paprika for Hungary, garlic for Italy, and peppers with tomato for Spain. The dish here is a simplified cousin of pollo a la chilindrón, the Aragonese braise of chicken with peppers, tomato and onion, though the book gives it no such name and serves it with boiled rice. The two-stage method, boiling before frying, is a genuine period habit rather than a flourish: the hen that had stopped laying could not be fried tender without being simmered first.