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Baked Chicken with Parsnips
Wash, scrape, and quarter parsnips, and parboil for twenty minutes; prepare a young chicken by splitting open at back, place in a dripping-pan, skin side up, lay parsnips around the chicken, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add a lump of butter the size of an egg, or two or three slices of good pickled pork; put enough water in pan to prevent burning, place in oven and bake until chicken and parsnips are done to a delicate brown; serve chicken separately on a platter, pouring the gravy in the pan over the parsnips.
A spatchcocked bird roasted over parboiled parsnips, with the pan juices poured back over the vegetables. The method holds up; only the timings and the pork need translating.
- Split at the backThis is spatchcocking: cut down either side of the backbone with shears, remove it, and press the bird flat, skin side up. Flattening is what lets a whole chicken cook at the same rate as root vegetables in one pan.
- A young chickenA small spring bird rather than a modern roaster. A broiler of 3 to 3½ lb is a reasonable stand-in; anything larger, and the parsnips are better added partway through so they do not collapse.
- Parboiling timeTwenty minutes suits large, woody parsnips. Supermarket parsnips will likely need only 5 to 8 minutes in boiling salted water, just to take the raw edge off. Halve any thick pieces lengthwise and cut out the fibrous core if it is tough.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is there to baste the breast and enrich the pan gravy.
- Pickled porkThe period alternative to butter: pork belly cured in brine, unsmoked. Salt pork is the nearest thing on a modern counter. Rinse it and taste the pan juices before adding any further salt, since the recipe's salt and the pork together can overshoot.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake at 400F for browning without drying the breast. The chicken is done at 165F in the thickest part of the breast and 175F at the thigh joint, typically 45 to 55 minutes for a 3 lb bird.
- Water in the panAdd only a shallow film, a cup at most, and top it up if it threatens to dry out. Too much and the parsnips steam grey instead of browning, and there is no concentrated gravy left to pour over them.
- ServingFeeds four. The pan gravy is thin and unthickened by design; skim the fat before pouring it over the parsnips if the pork has rendered heavily.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book compiled at Marysville, Ohio, though the 1877 edition was issued from Minneapolis, and its poultry chapter seems to address a household that keeps birds rather than buys them. That may be why the recipe calls for a young chicken with no weight attached: the cook knew which bird in the yard was ready. Parsnips belong to the same economy. They were left in the ground through the frost, which converts their starch to sugar, and dug through the winter and early spring, making them one of the few vegetables available at exactly the season when the previous year's chicks had grown to eating size. The choice between butter and pickled pork may be the recipe's real period marker: both were pantry staples, and which you reached for arguably depended on what the household had put by rather than on taste.