Cut a spring chicken into pieces at the joints; season with salt and pepper and fry until brown. Remove the chicken; add 1 onion, 2 cloves of garlic chopped and 1 cup of tomato-sauce. Cover and let simmer; then add the chicken with 1 glass of sherry wine. Cook ten minutes. Serve hot with boiled rice.
A one-pan braise written in the shorthand of its era, which assumes you know the fat, the pan and the doneness without being told. Two things need attention: the size of the bird and the length of the final cooking.
- The ten minutes is the problemTen minutes of simmering will not bring bone-in chicken pieces to a safe 165F unless the bird really is a tiny spring chicken and the pieces were nearly cooked through in the frying. Return the chicken to the sauce and simmer covered for 20-25 minutes, checking the thickest part of the thigh with a thermometer.
- Spring chickenA young bird, generally understood in this period as something on the order of 2 lb and more tender than a modern roaster. A small fryer cut into eight is the nearest easy substitute; if you use a full-size 4 lb chicken, extend the braise accordingly.
- A glass of sherryIn recipes of this vintage a "glass" usually means a wineglass or sherry glass, roughly 2 fl oz (1/4 cup), though a little more will do no harm. Use a dry fino or amontillado rather than cream sherry, and avoid the salted "cooking sherry" sold in supermarkets.
- Tomato-sauceIn older American cookbooks this generally meant cooked and sieved tomato rather than a seasoned pasta sauce, though some period "tomato sauces" were thickened and seasoned. One cup of passata, or a cup of canned crushed tomatoes briefly cooked down, works here.
- The fat is unspecifiedThe book leaves it open. Olive oil suits the dish and the cuisine; lard would have been equally likely in a Spanish kitchen of the period. Brown the pieces hard in a wide heavy pan and do not crowd them.
- Build the sauce in the same panSoften the onion and garlic in the browning fat, scraping up the fond, before the tomato goes in. "Cover and let simmer" wants about 10 minutes, until the raw edge is off the tomato and the sauce has tightened.
- YieldServes three to four with rice. Season the sauce again at the end; the sherry and the reduction shift the balance.
This is chicken browned and then finished in tomato, onion, garlic and a splash of sherry, a pattern found widely in Spanish cooking. Collections like this one, which marched a reader through a year of dishes labelled by nationality, reduced whole cuisines to a single identifying gesture, and for Spain that gesture was often garlic plus sherry. Sherry from Jerez had long been a fixture of the English-speaking wine trade, which may be part of why it stood in for Spanishness in American cookbooks; garlic, by contrast, was still comparatively unfamiliar in mainstream American cooking of the period, and two cloves of it signalled the foreign origin as clearly as the title did. The pairing with plain boiled rice rather than potatoes or bread is another national marker.