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Baked Chickens
Dress the chickens and cut them in two, soak for half an hour in cold water, wipe perfectly dry and put in a dripping-pan, bone side down, without any water; have a hot oven, and, if the chickens are young, half an hour's cooking will be sufficient. Take out, and season with butter, salt and pepper; pack one above another as closely as possible, and place in pan over boiling water, covering them closely this keeps them moist until served-boil the giblets in a little water, and, after the chickens are taken from the dripping-pan, put into it the water in which giblets were boiled, thicken it, and add the chopped giblets. This manner of baking chickens is fully equal to broiling them. -Mrs. E. W. Herrick, Minneapolis, Minn.
A split-and-roast method from a period when "broiled chicken" meant a young bird of two or three pounds. The technique still works; the timing belongs to a smaller bird than you will buy today.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; "hot" in period usage is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. The pan goes in dry, bone side down, so the skin renders and browns rather than steams.
- Half an hour is for a spring chickenHalf an hour is for a young bird -- The birds meant here were far smaller than what you will buy today, on the order of a couple of pounds. A modern 3½-4 lb bird split in half needs 40-50 minutes at that heat. Go by an instant-read thermometer: 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- Dress the chickensMeans pluck, singe and draw. Your bird arrives done; you only need to split it down the backbone and through the breast, or buy two halves.
- The soakHalf an hour in cold water was probably about drawing residual blood from a freshly killed bird. It is optional now, but the instruction that follows it is not — wipe the skin perfectly dry or it will not brown.
- Holding over boiling waterEffectively a stovetop bain-marie: a covered pan set over a pot of simmering water, which keeps the meat hot. Useful if dinner is delayed, though the skin will soften and the meat will dry the longer it sits.
- GibletsNeck, heart and gizzard, simmered 45 minutes; the liver only in the last 10, or it turns bitter and grainy. Chop them fine for the gravy.
- Thicken itNo proportion is given. For roughly a cup of giblet liquor plus the pan drippings, use 1½ tablespoons flour cooked in the fat left in the dripping-pan before the liquid goes in.
- YieldTwo halves feed two to four, depending on the bird. Double for a table of six.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from contributions by Ohio and Midwestern housewives, which is why so many entries carry a name and a town — here Mrs. E. W. Herrick of Minneapolis. Her closing claim, that the method is "fully equal to broiling them," is the point of the recipe: broiling was often said to be the finer way to serve a young bird, but it demanded constant attention over a coal or wood fire and produced only as much as the gridiron would hold. Oven-baking freed the cook and scaled to a crowd, and the trick of packing the cooked halves over boiling water addresses the problem of serving many plates at once. The chickens themselves were seasonal: before year-round hatchery production, tender broilers meant late spring and early summer birds, and by autumn the same flock was destined for stewing.