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Baked Chickens
After having washed the chickens, split down the back bone, put them in a dripping pan with half cup of butter and one cup water, cover them until nearly done, then take off cover. Have a very hot oven and brown them. The taste is very similar to broiled chickens, many prefer them cooked in this way, to broiled chickens.
A spatchcocked chicken roasted under cover, then finished uncovered in fierce heat. The method still works; only the vagueness needs filling in.
- The hingeEverything depends on the two-stage heat: covered so the bird steams in butter and water without drying, then uncovered so the skin browns. Take the cover off too early and the exposed breast overcooks before the legs are done.
- Oven temperaturesNone is given. For the covered stage about 375F works; raise to 450F or more to brown. "A very hot oven" conventionally meant as hot as the range would go, in the region of 450-500F.
- Split down the back boneThis is spatchcocking. Cut along either side of the backbone with shears, remove it, and press the bird flat so it lies in one layer. Old-style "chickens" for broiling were small, 1.5-2.5 lb; two of them serve four.
- Dripping panThe shallow pan that sat under a roast to catch fat. A half-sheet pan or a large low-sided roasting pan does the same job. Cover with foil rather than hunting for a domed lid.
- TimingNone is given. A 2 lb spatchcocked bird needs roughly 30 minutes covered and 10-15 uncovered; go by an instant-read thermometer at 165F in the thickest part of the thigh.
- Butter and waterHalf a cup of butter to one cup of water is a generous amount of fat, though the recipe is written for more than one bird, and it will not emulsify. What collects in the pan is a good basting liquid and, skimmed and reduced, a passable sauce.
- SeasoningThe original names none. Salt the bird well before it goes in, and pepper it.
Cookbooks often treated broiling — small split birds over live coals or under a gas broiler — as a standard treatment for chicken, and this recipe is frankly an argument that the oven does it better. The comparison the author draws is the point: home ranges with reliable enclosed ovens were, it is generally held, displacing open-hearth and gridiron cooking, and recipes like this one coaxed cooks into the new equipment by promising a familiar result. "Chickens" here means young broilers, birds a couple of pounds at most, since the poultry sold for this purpose was killed far younger and smaller than a modern roasting chicken.]</blockquote>