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Breaded Chicken
Cut a tender chicken into seven pieces as if for frying, roll in beaten yolks of two eggs, then in finely grated bread crumbs seasoned with chopped parsley, pepper and salt; place in dripping-pan, dot the pieces with bits of butter (one table-spoon in all), add a little water, bake slowly, basting often. When done, take out chicken and make gravy in the pan by adding a mixture of flour and butter, make smooth by stirring. Add either cream or milk to make sufficient gravy, which season to taste.
A plain baked-breaded chicken from a book that assumed a small farm bird and a wood range. Two things need translating: what "bake slowly" should mean for a crumbed coating, and the fact that the pan gravy is a beurre manié, not a roux.
- Seven piecesMost likely two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, and the breast (with the back either left on the breast or discarded); the recipe doesn't specify. A modern cut-up broiler gives you eight; use it as is.
- The birdA "tender chicken" here means a young bird, probably in the region of 2 to 3 lb dressed. A supermarket fryer at 3 1/2 to 4 lb behaves much the same way; anything larger wants longer cooking than the crumbs will tolerate.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no oven temperatures; on a wood range a slow oven would be somewhere in the region of 300-325F in modern terms. At that heat a crumb coating dries rather than browns, so 350-375F is probably the better reading of the instruction's intent — cooked through without the crust burning.
- Water in the pan, and bastingThe little water and the frequent basting are there to keep a lean farm bird from drying out, but both soften the crumbs and can wash the coating off. Baste with the butter and fat only, tipping the pan, and leave the crust alone in the last fifteen minutes.
- Bread crumbs"Finely grated" means crumbs grated from a stale loaf, close in texture to fine dry breadcrumbs. Panko will not sit tightly against the egg-yolk wash the way these do.
- Egg yolks aloneYolks only give a richer, more adhesive coating than whole egg, but two yolks are barely enough to coat a whole bird. Loosen them with a spoonful of milk or add a third yolk rather than stretching them thin.
- DonenessCook to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone. Reckon on 45 to 60 minutes at 375F for a cut-up 4 lb bird.
- The gravy"a mixture of flour and butter" stirred into the hot pan reads as beurre manie rather than a cooked roux, though the recipe doesn't say whether the mixture is kneaded cold. Roughly equal parts butter and flour, added in small pieces and stirred until smooth before the cream goes in; the recipe leaves the amount to you, as its one tablespoon of butter goes on the chicken. Simmer a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- YieldServes four, generously three if the gravy is going over potatoes as well.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from contributed receipts, the collection being associated with Methodist church fundraising. Its poultry chapter distinguishes birds largely by age rather than by cut — broilers, fryers, roasters, then old fowl for the stewpan and the fricassee — and breading belongs to the young-bird end of that scale. A tender chicken was a seasonal thing in a household that kept its own flock — spring hatchings eaten in early summer — and the crumb coat with a dripping-pan and a slow oven was an alternative to standing over a skillet of hot fat, freeing the cook while the range did the work. Finishing pan gravy with cream rather than stock would be unremarkable in a dairying region: what was on hand went in.