Clean and season a fat hen. Chop the giblets; add some truffles, a chopped onion, parsley, bread-crumbs, a beaten egg, salt, black pepper and paprica to taste. Then fill the chicken; heat some dripping in a large saucepan; lay in the chicken, cover, and cook slowly with 1 cup of hot water until tender.
A pot-braised stuffed hen, closer to a French poule en cocotte than to a roast. The stuffing is bound with raw egg and giblets, so temperature at the centre of the cavity is the thing to watch.
- The hinge: cook the stuffing to temperatureBecause the bird is covered and steamed rather than roasted, the cavity heats slowly. The stuffing must reach 165F/74C at its centre; check there rather than in the thigh, which will come up first.
- "A fat hen"Probably a well-fattened, older bird rather than a young roaster, which suits the covered pot better than the oven. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken stands in and will likely be tender in something over an hour, where an older stewing hen may want two; the recipe itself says only "until tender."
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat saved from roasting. Any neutral fat or clarified butter works; enough to film the pan. Note that the recipe does not actually call for browning the bird -- it goes into the hot fat, is covered, and cooks with the water.
- GibletsHeart, liver and gizzard, minced fine. Supermarket birds often come with only a neck and no liver; a couple of ounces of chicken livers from the counter make up the difference. Discard the gall bladder if it is still attached to the liver.
- TrufflesTinned black truffle and truffle peelings were available to well-supplied kitchens of the period. A teaspoon of truffle paste or a few grams of shaved preserved truffle gives the intended note; dried porcini, soaked and chopped, is the honest substitute.
- "Paprica"Sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked and not hot. A teaspoon is about right for a bird this size.
- BreadcrumbsStale crumb, not dry commercial crumbs, which will drink the egg and set hard. Roughly 2 cups of torn day-old bread to one egg.
- Heat and vesselCook covered over low heat so the water barely simmers, adding a little more if the pan threatens to dry. A heavy Dutch oven does this best, and the same thing can be done in a 325F oven with the lid on.
- Yield and the pan juicesThe recipe gives no yield; a bird this size should serve about four. The cup of water plus the chicken's own juices reduces to a small amount of concentrated broth; skim it and spoon it over the carved bird, or thicken lightly with a little flour.
Braising a whole stuffed fowl in a covered pot with barely a cup of liquid is peasant economy rather than restaurant cookery: it makes an old bird edible, keeps the fat and juices in the pot instead of the fire, and needs only a banked stove. The Bavarian label here belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century "dishes of all nations" books, which assigned a nationality to each day of the year and drew the line on fairly slender evidence -- the onion, parsley and breadcrumb stuffing bound with egg is common to German-speaking kitchens generally, and the truffle reads as a cosmopolitan flourish. What may be of the region is the method: the everyday hen went into a pot with fat and a lid on top.