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Chickens Stewed with Olives
Cut 2 young chickens into joints and put to cook in 3 pints of water with pepper, salt and an onion. Cook until the chickens are very tender. Take up, drain and wipe chickens and fry them in Crisco till they brown. Strain water in which chickens were cooked and take a little more than 1/2 a pint of it for sauce. Put this into the frying pan in which chickens were fried, thicken it a little, and into it put 2 dozens olives, chopped, and 1 tablespoon capers. When it is quite hot and smooth pour over chickens and serve.
A two-stage chicken dish from the Crisco era: poach, then fry, then build a quick pan sauce from the poaching liquid. The method is sound, but the original assumes birds and a brand of fat that need a word of explanation.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so Crisco appears in nearly every recipe. Any neutral high-heat fat works; butter with a little oil browns the skin best.
- "Young chickens"Probably two small birds of a couple of pounds each, what a market would now sell as small fryers. One 4 lb chicken cut into eight joints will serve the same number.
- Cooking until "very tender"Small birds in barely simmering water need 30 to 40 minutes, not the hour-plus an older fowl would take. Push them past that and the meat shreds when you try to fry it, so pull them while the joints still hold together.
- Dry the pieces properlyThis is the hinge of the dish. Poached chicken carries a lot of surface water; wipe each joint and let it air-dry a few minutes or it will steam rather than brown, and the skin will slacken under the sauce.
- "A little more than 1/2 a pint"A little over 1 cup of strained broth. What is left, close to 2 1/2 pints less whatever boiled away, is good stock and worth keeping rather than pouring away.
- "Thicken it a little"No quantity is given. A tablespoon of flour stirred into the frying fat before the broth goes in, or a slurry of a teaspoon of cornstarch, gives the light coating sauce intended here.
- Olives and capersTwo dozen means whole olives, chopped after pitting; green Spanish-style olives suit the sauce better than oil-cured black. Both olives and capers are salty, so hold back on salt until the sauce is finished and tasted.
- YieldServes four to six. Rice, plain boiled potatoes or bread are wanted to catch the sauce.
This comes from a 1910s promotional cookbook issued to persuade American cooks to replace lard and butter with a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, which is why an otherwise Mediterranean-leaning dish is fried in Crisco. Chicken with olives and capers is a long-standing pattern around the Mediterranean and in Spanish and Creole kitchens in the United States, where brined olives supplied acidity and salt in a sauce built on nothing more than poaching liquid and pan fat. The two-stage treatment, boiling and then frying, is older still: it was one way to get a tough or lean bird tender and browned at once, and it survived into printed cookbooks long after tender young market chickens made it optional.