Cut a spring chicken in pieces at the joints; season with salt and pepper and sauté in hot butter. Add 2 cups of cream sauce, ½ cup of boiled rice, some chopped parsley and bits of butter. Let stew slowly until the chicken is very tender. Serve hot.
A short, workmanlike fricassee that depends entirely on gentle heat and a decent cream sauce. Two things in the original need translating: what a spring chicken was, and what "cream sauce" meant in a 1900s kitchen.
- Keep it below a simmerThis is the hinge. Cream sauce held at a rolling boil with chicken in it will break and the meat will tighten. Barest bubble, lid ajar, 35-45 minutes.
- Spring chickenA young bird of roughly 2 to 2½ lb, slaughtered at a few months. The nearest modern equivalent is a small 3 lb chicken cut into eight, or an equal weight of thighs and drumsticks, which hold up better to stewing than modern breast meat.
- Cream sauceIn books of this period this means a béchamel enriched with cream, not cream on its own: about 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour cooked together, then 2 cups of milk or half milk and half cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season it before it goes near the chicken.
- The riceHalf a cup of already-boiled rice is a thickener and a stretcher, not a side dish. The original adds it with the sauce at the start; if you want the grains to keep their shape, add it nearer the end instead.
- "Bits of butter"Perhaps 1 to 2 tbsp. The original drops them in with the sauce; if you would rather taste the butter distinctly, hold it back and swirl it through off the heat.
- Sauté means colour, not cooking throughSaut hrough -- Butter can catch if the pan is too hot, so keep the heat moderate; clarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, gives you more margin. Stop when the skin is golden.
- YieldServes three, four if you put it over more rice or boiled potatoes. Parsley goes in at the end so it stays green.
Creamed and stewed fowl of this kind is old domestic cooking across the Nordic countries, where a flour-and-milk sauce — what Swedish cooks call stuvning — was a standard way to make a small bird feed a family. Dishes labelled hönsfrikassé or stewed hen in Swedish household books follow much the same pattern: brown the joints, cover them in a white sauce, cook slowly, finish with butter and parsley. The book this comes from belongs to a genre popular in the early twentieth century: a dish for every day of the year, each tagged with a nationality, aimed at American housekeepers who wanted variety without new technique. The nationality is often little more than a label, and the recipes are compressed to a few lines on the assumption that the cook already knows how to make a cream sauce — which is why this one never tells you.