Cut 2 spring chickens into pieces at the joints; season with salt, ginger, pepper and curry-powder and let fry in hot olive-oil until brown. Remove the chicken; add ¼ cup of chopped leeks, ½ pint of Japanese sauce, ½ cup of chrysanthemum flowers, 2 chopped red peppers, some bamboo sprouts shaved thin and ½ cup of water. Cover and let cook ten minutes. Add the chicken to the sauce with 1 cup of cocoanut juice. Let all simmer until the chicken is tender. Serve on a platter with a border of cooked rice and garnish with fried parsley.
A 1900s American book's idea of a Japanese braise, filtered through curry powder and coconut. It works as a dish, but several of its ingredient names need translating before you shop.
- Japanese sauceThis almost certainly means soy sauce, the one Japanese seasoning reliably sold in American groceries at the time. Half a pint is a full cup, which with added salt will be punishing; start with a quarter cup of soy plus water or stock and adjust at the end.
- Salt the chicken lightlyThe recipe salts the pieces before frying and then adds a large volume of soy. Season the chicken with the spices only, and let the sauce carry the salt.
- Spring chickensYoung birds of roughly 1½ to 2 lb each. Two of them equal one modern 3½ lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces, which serves four to six over rice.
- Chrysanthemum flowersUse culinary chrysanthemum — dried edible kiku petals sold in Japanese and Chinese groceries, or the leaves of garland chrysanthemum (shungiku). Florist's chrysanthemums are treated and are not food. Petals turn bitter with long cooking; add them in the last few minutes.
- Bamboo sproutsCanned or vacuum-packed bamboo shoots, rinsed well and sliced thin. Fresh shoots must be boiled before use; the tinned ones already have been.
- Cocoanut juiceAmbiguous in period usage: it can mean the thin water from inside the nut or a light second-pressing coconut milk. Coconut water gives the lighter result the ten-minute sauce implies; canned coconut milk thinned by half is closer to the richer reading.
- Red peppersMost likely fresh red chillies rather than sweet bell peppers, though period recipes use the phrase both ways. If you read them as chillies, two chopped plus curry powder makes a fairly hot dish; seed them if that matters.
- Fried parsleyFlat-leaf parsley, dried thoroughly, dropped into 350F oil for a few seconds until it stops sputtering, then drained. Wet parsley will spit violently.
Books of this kind — a dish a day, each labelled with a country — were a staple of the American culinary press around the turn of the twentieth century, when steamship travel and world's fairs had made foreign cooking fashionable and Japan in particular was an object of enormous decorative enthusiasm. The recipe reflects that enthusiasm more than any Japanese kitchen: curry powder is Anglo-Indian, coconut belongs to Southeast Asia, and "Japanese sauce" is most likely a vague grocer's term for soy. Chrysanthemum, though, is genuine; edible chrysanthemum petals and the leaves of shungiku have long been eaten in Japan, and the flower's association with the imperial house made it one of the most recognisable Japanese emblems to Western readers, which may be why it turns up here. What the dish really documents is what an American cook of the period could plausibly buy — soy sauce and tinned bamboo shoots were obtainable in at least some markets — and what she imagined the rest tasted like.