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Brown Fricassee of Chicken
Draw, singe, and joint chicken. Put 4 tablespoons Crisco in saucepan; when brown, put in chicken. Stir until every piece is nicely browned, then add 2 tablespoons flour, stir again, add 1 pint boiling water or stock, stir until it boils; add 1 teaspoon of salt. Cover, and let simmer gently until tender, then add 1 teaspoon onion juice, and little black pepper. Put neck-piece, heart, liver, gizzard, and back pieces in center of dish; put 2 pieces of breast on top, second joints on one side of plate, legs crossed on other, and wing at each end of plate. Pour sauce over, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and serve.
A straightforward braise written for a cook who bought her chicken whole and undressed. The only real work modern readers are spared is the first sentence.
- Draw and singeDrawing means removing the innards, singeing means burning off the pinfeathers over a flame. A supermarket bird needs neither; buy a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken, cut into eight or ten pieces, and ask for the giblets if you want the garnish the recipe describes.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional volume, so the shortening is not incidental. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works, and 4 tablespoons of butter and oil mixed will brown better and taste more of something.
- "When brown"The fat itself should not brown, which would mean it is close to smoking. Heat it until it shimmers and a scrap of chicken sizzles on contact, then add the pieces skin down in a single layer and work in batches if the pan is crowded.
- A pintTwo cups. Against 4 tablespoons of fat and 2 tablespoons of flour this makes a thin, pourable gravy rather than a coating sauce, which is what the plating calls for.
- How long is tenderNo time is given. Dark meat wants 35 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer; breast pieces are done at about 25 and can be lifted out and returned at the end to keep them from drying.
- Onion juiceA standby of period cookbooks: onion grated on a fine grater and the liquid pressed out, giving flavour without visible pieces. Grated onion added with the flour is a reasonable substitute.
- Brown versus white fricasseeThe browning is the whole distinction. A white fricassee starts the chicken in fat without colouring it and finishes with cream or egg yolk; here the flour is toasted in the browned fond, which is where the colour and most of the flavour come from.
- YieldFour servings, and the arrangement described assumes one bird laid out on a single platter. Reserve the giblets while the chicken braises if you want them cooked through but not collapsed.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company brought to market in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter. That accounts for the brand name in the second sentence and for the book's general habit of frying and browning in shortening where an older English cookbook would have said dripping. The dish itself is much older: fricassee comes into English from French in the sixteenth century, describing meat cut up, cooked in fat, and finished in its own sauce, and by the eighteenth century fricasseed chicken was standard on both sides of the Atlantic. What dates this version is the plating instruction, an unusually detailed piece of choreography that reassembles the carved bird on the platter with the giblets and back hidden in the middle and the choice pieces on top.