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Philadelphia Chickens
Boil one chicken very tender with one small onion, then take out the bones; cut it in long good sized pieces, slice lemon very thin and line a deep dish with it, then place the chicken in the dish on the lemon and prepare the mixture for it which is made in this way: boil the water the chicken was boiled in, down to about a pint, then season it with a little mace, pepper and salt; in the meantime have one-half a box Cox's gelatine soaked in about one pint of cold water. Pour this in the chicken gravy, strain and pour over the chicken; place it where it will be cold and turn out on the dish you wish to serve it on.
A jellied chicken loaf, meant to be turned out cold and sliced. Everything depends on getting enough gelatine into a well-reduced, well-seasoned stock.
- The hinge: dissolve, don't boilSoften the gelatine in the cold pint of water until spongy, then stir it into the hot reduced broth off the heat until fully dissolved. Boiling gelatine weakens its set and clouds the jelly.
- "Half a box Cox's gelatine"Box sizes are not consistently recorded, but a boxed nineteenth-century gelatine of this sort held on the order of an ounce or two, so half a box is very roughly an ounce, or about four modern quarter-ounce envelopes. Against the quart of liquid this recipe ends up with (a pint of reduced broth plus the pint the gelatine soaked in), that is in the right range for a jelly firm enough to unmould; the original quantity is not precise, so err toward the full ounce if you want clean slices.
- The chickenThe recipe gives no weight or time, only 'very tender.' A bird sold for boiling in this period was often an older fowl that wanted a long, bare simmer; a modern 3 to 4 lb chicken will be tender in something over an hour. Expect roughly three to four cups of picked meat.
- Reduce, then degreaseBoiling the cooking liquid down to a pint concentrates both flavour and the bird's own collagen. Skim the fat carefully before adding the gelatine, or the turned-out loaf will have a greasy cap.
- Season past comfortCold dulls salt and spice noticeably. Taste the hot stock and season it a shade stronger than you would for soup; mace here is the dried aril, the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, whether in blade or ground form, and is generally reckoned lighter and more delicate than nutmeg itself.
- The lemon liningSlice the lemon paper-thin, pull out the seeds, and lay the slices flat against the bottom and sides of the dish. They become the top and outside of the finished loaf, so overlap them evenly. Heavy pith will turn bitter as the dish stands.
- Chilling and unmouldingCool the filled dish quickly, then refrigerate at least six hours or overnight. To turn it out, dip the dish briefly in hot water to the rim, run a thin knife around the edge, and invert onto a cold platter.
- Yield and keepingServes six to eight as a supper or luncheon dish with salad and bread. Keep it refrigerated and eat within three days; it is cooked meat in a moist jelly and will not sit out.
Jellied fowl belongs to the long tradition of aspic cookery, in which the gelatine drawn from bones and feet was clarified, seasoned and used to set cooked meat into a sliceable loaf. What changed in the second half of the nineteenth century was convenience: commercial refined gelatine, sold in sheets and later in granular form under brand names such as Cox's and, from 1890, Knox, meant a cook no longer had to boil calves' feet for hours to get a reliable set. Recipes that name the brand directly, as this one does, are unlikely to predate the spread of packaged gelatine in American household books in the later nineteenth century. The dish fits the era's cold supper table, where a moulded loaf could be made a day ahead and carried whole to the table. The lemon lining is doing double duty as decoration and as a sharp note against the bland richness of the jelly.