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Chicken Stew with Tea Biscuit
Dress, clean and cut up a fowl. Place in stew pan, cover with boiling water. Add three slices onion, one stalk celery broken in pieces, six slices carrot, spray of parsley, one-half teaspoon peppercorns and a small bit bay leaf. Heat to boiling point, skim, cover and simmer slowly until meat is tender; the last hour of cooking add one tablespoon salt. Remove chicken, add one cup thin cream, strain stock and thicken with flour diluted with cold milk or water. Add one-half tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Serve with Tea Biscuit. If a richer sauce is desired, butter may be added to stock.
A plain fricassee-style stew that depends entirely on the bird. The original assumes a mature hen bought whole and undrawn; almost everything else follows from that.
- "Fowl" means a stewing henIn period usage a fowl was a laying hen past her prime, typically several pounds, tough and deeply flavored, needing 2 to 3 hours of simmering. A supermarket broiler-fryer will be falling apart in 50 to 60 minutes and the stock will be thinner. If you can find a stewing hen or an older rooster at a farm market or halal butcher, the recipe works as written.
- "Dress and clean"This meant plucking, singeing off pinfeathers, and drawing the bird. A dressed chicken from the market skips all of it; just remove any giblet packet and cut the bird into 8 or 10 pieces.
- Salt earlier, not laterHolding the tablespoon of salt back until the last hour reflects an old belief that early salting toughens meat, which does not hold up; it also guards against over-salting as the pot reduces. Salt the pot at the start so the meat itself seasons, and taste before you add the full tablespoon. The recipe does not say how much water is used, only that the bird is covered.
- Keep it below a simmerThe hinge of the dish. Heat to boiling once, skim the gray foam, then hold the pot at a bare tremble. A rolling boil shreds the meat, clouds the stock, and emulsifies fat into it, and no amount of straining afterward will fix that.
- "Thin cream"Roughly 18 to 20 percent butterfat: today's light cream, or half-and-half as a lighter substitute. Heavy cream will make the sauce heavier than intended. Add it off the boil so it does not break.
- The thickening is unmeasuredNo flour quantity is given. For a sauce of gravy consistency, figure about 1 to 2 tablespoons flour per cup of strained stock plus cream, shaken smooth with cold milk or water, then simmered two or three minutes to cook out the raw taste. Judge by the spoon rather than a number.
- Strain, and mean itWhole peppercorns and the bay fragment are aromatics, not food. Pour the stock through a fine sieve before thickening, and skim the fat that rises, unless you are taking the recipe's offer of butter for a richer sauce.
- Tea BiscuitA baking-powder biscuit, served alongside; the recipe says only "Serve with Tea Biscuit" and does not direct how it is placed. Any plain rolled biscuit, baked as your own recipe directs, does the job.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a hen of this size with biscuits would serve roughly six.
Chicken stewed in its own broth and finished with cream and flour is the American plain-cooking version of a fricassee, and it appears in cookbooks like this one because it solved two problems at once: it used the old laying hen, whose meat was too tough for roasting, and it produced both a meat course and a sauce from a single pot. The vegetables here are not meant to be eaten -- onion, celery, carrot, parsley, peppercorn and bay are the standard bouquet of a stock pot, discarded at the strainer, a habit borrowed from French practice. Serving it over split baking-powder biscuit rather than dumplings or pastry is characteristically American, and the pairing survives more or less unchanged as chicken and biscuits.