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CHICKEN BROTH
Take the first and second joints of a chicken, boil in one quart of water till very tender, and season with a very little salt and pepper.
A convalescent broth of the plainest kind: two pieces of chicken, water, and almost no seasoning. The few things worth knowing are what the joints are and how gently to cook them.
- "First and second joints"In nineteenth-century American carving language the "second joint" is normally the thigh and the "first joint" the drumstick — together what a supermarket sells as a leg quarter. Some period books apply the phrase to the wing sections instead. For broth the leg is the likelier reading, since it carries the connective tissue that gives body.
- QuantityOne quart of water to roughly a pound of bone-in chicken. Some will go to evaporation, more if the pot is uncovered, so expect rather less than a quart of finished broth.
- "Till very tender"Forty-five minutes to an hour at a bare simmer. The meat should pull from the bone without resistance; a hard boil for the same time will cloud the broth and toughen what meat you might want to serve alongside.
- SkimmingThe original says nothing about it. If you want a clear broth, bring the pot slowly to temperature and lift off the grey scum as it rises during the first ten minutes, or it will disperse and leave the broth murky.
- "A very little salt"Deliberate. Sickroom cookery of the period kept seasoning low for patients with fever or digestive trouble. For ordinary eating you will want considerably more salt than the recipe implies — season at the end, once the liquid has reduced.
- Straining and fatStrain through a fine sieve and chill if there is time; the fat sets on top and lifts off in a disc. Skimming a warm broth with a spoon leaves most of it behind.
- KeepingThere is no preservative here and no acid. Cool it quickly, refrigerate, and use within three days, or freeze in cup portions.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) devotes a whole section to invalid cookery, and its inclusion is not sentimental — before antibiotics, nursing a household through typhoid, pneumonia or a long fever was work that fell to the kitchen, and cookbooks of the period treated invalid cookery as a distinct branch with its own rules: nothing rich, nothing highly seasoned, nothing that required effort to eat. Chicken broth is the archetype of that thinking, and the instruction to use "a very little" salt and pepper reflects a widely held belief that a weakened stomach could not manage stimulation. The dish itself is far older than the book; chicken soup as restorative food is documented in medieval medical writing and appears across European and Middle Eastern traditions, generally traced in the West to the humoral medicine that classed fowl as light and easily digested. What the Buckeye version shows is how little the American household version had accumulated by the 1870s — two joints, a quart of water, and no vegetables at all.