Clean a fat hen and cut into pieces at the joints; season and let stew with 2 sliced onions, 2 carrots and 1 potato, cut into dice pieces. When nearly done, add 1 cup of sauerkraut, 2 tablespoonfuls of sorrel and ½ cup of wine. Let cook until tender and serve on a platter with cooked rice.
A one-pot stewed hen brightened at the end with sauerkraut, sorrel and wine. The original assumes a bird tough enough to survive two hours of simmering and a cook who knows how much liquid to add.
- The hinge: add the sour things lateSauerkraut, sorrel and wine all go in near the end, as written. Cooks often find that meat started in strongly acidic liquid stays firmer for longer, though the mechanism is disputed.
- "A fat hen"This means a mature stewing hen of 5 to 6 lb, sold now mainly at farm stands and some Asian and Latin markets. It needs 1½ to 2 hours of gentle simmering. A supermarket 4-to-5-lb broiler-fryer will be tender in 45 to 60 minutes, and bone-in thighs in about 40.
- Liquid, which the recipe never mentions"Let stew" presumes enough water or broth to nearly cover the pieces — roughly 4 cups for a whole cut-up bird. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a boil so the meat does not seize and shred.
- SeasonSalt and black pepper. A bay leaf, a few allspice berries and some marjoram are all standard in Polish stewing and would not be out of place.
- SorrelTwo tablespoons of chopped fresh sorrel leaves, which collapse to almost nothing and taste sharply of lemon. If you cannot find it, a tablespoon of lemon juice stirred in at the end gives the acidity but not the grassy note; jarred sorrel purée sold in Eastern European groceries is closer.
- SauerkrautUse refrigerated sauerkraut rather than the canned kind, and drain it. Taste before adding the wine — some brands are salty enough that the stew needs no further seasoning.
- The wineA dry white. Half a cup in a pot this size reads as brightness rather than as wine, and it will not cook off entirely in the short time left.
- The lone potatoOne diced potato in a stew this large is a thickener, not a vegetable. It breaks down and lightly binds the broth.
- YieldFour to six, with rice. Boiled potatoes or buckwheat groats work as well as the rice specified.
Chicken simmered with sauerkraut and sorrel sits squarely in the Polish kitchen's long preference for sour flavourings: kwaśnica built on sauerkraut brine, żurek on fermented rye, zupa szczawiowa on sorrel. Before lemons were cheap and general, cultivated sorrel and the liquid from the kraut barrel were the household's everyday acids, and both were reliably available through a northern winter when fresh greens were not. The dish appears here in a calendar format that assigns one "national" dish to each day of the year, with recipes kept short and loosely specified.