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Roast Fowl with Chestnuts and Mushrooms
Stuff 1 large or 2 small fowls with chestnuts or mushroom stuffing, truss it, brush with melted Crisco, dust with salt and pepper, and put on a rack in pan and in a hot oven until beginning to brown, reduce heat, and cook 1 or 2 hours, basting often. Add to pan 1/2 cup hot water, 1 slice salt pork, diced, tiny bit bay leaf, 1 clove, and sprig of parsley. If with mushrooms pour over little sherry mixed with cream. When done place fowl on platter, pour off all fat in pan but 3 tablespoons, add 2 tablespoons flour and slightly color, add 1 cup stock from giblets cooked with 1 slice of salt pork, salt and pepper, a little lemon juice, and minced giblets. Serve surrounded with chestnut or mushroom puree put through a pastry bag and tube in roses. Place a small piece of canned red pepper on each rose and serve gravy in boat.
A Crisco-company recipe from 1915, written for a cook who already knew how to truss and roast a bird. Two things need translating: what "fowl" meant then, and the oven numbers the book leaves out.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerIn 1915 a fowl was a mature laying hen, tough and full of flavour, which is why the recipe allows up to two hours with frequent basting. A modern 4-5 lb roasting chicken is a much younger bird and will be done in about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours; a true stewing hen, if you can find one, is better braised than roasted.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no numbers. Period sources put a "hot oven" somewhere in the 425-475F range; brown the bird at the top of that for the first 15 minutes or so, then reduce to a moderate oven, around 350F, for the remainder.
- Doneness, not clock timeIgnore the one-to-two-hour spread and use a thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, and 165F in the centre of the stuffing. A stuffed bird heats slowly at the core, which is the one place this recipe's vagueness matters.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works for brushing; softened butter browns the skin better.
- Salt porkSold in slabs near the bacon. If unavailable, use unsmoked pancetta or a thick slice of fatty bacon, and hold back on added salt in the gravy.
- Canned red pepperThis is canned or jarred pimiento, still sold in small jars. Roasted red pepper cut into small diamonds does the same job.
- Giblet stockSimmer neck, heart and gizzard with the salt pork and water for about 45 minutes while the bird roasts; add the liver only for the last 10 minutes or it turns bitter and grainy. Strain, then mince the giblets for the finished gravy.
- The sherry and creamThe recipe does not say when to add it. Add it toward the end of roasting rather than at the start; a long spell in a hot pan will scorch the cream and spoil it for the gravy.
- Puree rosesChestnut or mushroom puree must be stiff enough to hold a piped shape, which means thicker than you would want to eat on its own. Fold in a little butter and, for mushrooms, reduce the liquid hard before pureeing. Pipe onto a warm platter just before serving.
- YieldThe book gives no yield; one large bird with the puree and gravy will realistically serve four to six.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook published by fat and flour companies in the 1910s: a year of menus wrapped around the promotion of a single branded product, in this case the hydrogenated shortening Procter & Gamble had introduced a few years earlier. The dish itself is straightforwardly French-derived hotel cooking as it reached the American middle-class table — a stuffed roast finished with a giblet gravy, plated with piped vegetable puree and a dot of pimiento for colour. Chestnuts have long been paired with poultry in European cookery, and it was seasonal work: chestnuts arrived in autumn, had to be scored, roasted and peeled by hand, and the labour is invisible in a recipe that simply says "stuff with chestnuts." The piped rosettes and the little squares of red pepper are the period's signature, an echo of restaurant garnish practice trickling into domestic manuals.