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Stewed Chicken
Draw, since, and joint a stewing chicken. Season pieces with pepper and salt and cover with boiling water. Cover and stew gently until tender. Remove chicken. Place pieces in a colander on a plate in oven to drain, and thicken gravy by adding 1 tablespoon flour rubbed with 1 tablespoon Crisco. Add salt and pepper to taste, a little chopped parsley and 1 cup milk. Beat an egg until light; pour on it part of gravy, beating carefully to prevent lumps; return to remainder of gravy; bring to boil and pour over chicken. Mackerel, a la Claudine Take a nice large fresh mackerel, split it down back and remove bone, season fish with melted Crisco, chopped fresh mushrooms, salt, pepper, and finely chopped shallot; put on to a grill iron and cook in front or over brisk fire for about 15 minutes, then take up and serve on hot dish with the following sauce: Take 1 cup brown sauce, 2 tablespoons capers, pinch chopped parsley, four anchovies rubbed through sieve, 1 teaspoon glaze, and 1 chopped shallot, 3 or 4 shredded button mushrooms; boil up and simmer for 10 minutes, rub through sieve, then add juice of 1 lemon and 4 chopped olives, reboil and serve.
Two unrelated dishes have run together on this page: an egg-thickened stewed chicken and a grilled mackerel with a caper-anchovy sauce. Both are workable, but each has a step that modern cooks handle differently.
- The hinge: the egg-thickened gravyTempering the beaten egg with hot gravy is correct, but the final "bring to boil" risks curdling it if taken literally, even with the flour in the sauce. Return the mixture to the pan and heat only until it thickens and coats a spoon, around 170-175F; pull it off at the first sign of steam rising.
- "Draw, since, and joint""Since" is a printer's error for "singe" -- passing the bird over a flame to burn off pinfeathers. A supermarket chicken needs none of this; simply cut it into eight pieces.
- Stewing chickenA stewing hen is a mature laying bird, tough and flavorful, and it needs 2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering. A modern 4-5 lb roasting chicken will be tender in 60 to 75 minutes and will fall apart if pushed further.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it. Butter works in both recipes and tastes better; use equal weight. The flour-and-fat paste rubbed together cold is a beurre manié, whisked into the hot broth off the boil.
- Draining in the ovenThe colander-on-a-plate trick is to keep the pieces hot and dry while the gravy is finished. A 200F oven, loosely covered, does the same in 10 minutes.
- Brown sauce and glazeBrown sauce here means a flour-thickened brown stock (espagnole); a cup of good reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly will stand in. "Glaze" is meat glaze -- stock reduced to a syrup -- for which a teaspoon of demi-glace concentrate substitutes.
- Grilling the mackerelA "grill iron" used in front of or over a brisk fire is a gridiron, an iron frame or double-sided broiler set at the coals; hinged wire fish grills of this kind were common. Under a preheated broiler, 4 inches from the element, a split mackerel takes 8 to 10 minutes skin side up, not the full 15 the original allows for an open fire.
- YieldNeither dish is given a yield. The chicken serves four; one large mackerel serves two, and the sauce quantity suits that.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911 -- which is why the fat is named by brand in a gravy where another book might simply have said butter or drippings. The chicken belongs to the older tradition of stewing an aging laying hen until it surrenders, then enriching the broth with egg and milk. The mackerel carries a personal name in the manner of hotel and restaurant menus of the period, when dishes were routinely styled a la somebody, and its sauce -- brown sauce sharpened with anchovy, capers, olives and lemon -- is a standard of professional French cookery of the day, the sort of thing a promotional cookbook included to show that the new shortening could hold its own in ambitious company.