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Fricasseed Chicken
Cut up and put on to boil, skin side down, in a small quantity of water, season with salt, pepper, and slices of an onion if liked; stew gently until tender, remove chicken, add a half pint cream or milk to gravy, and thicken with butter and flour rubbed smoothly together (adding a little of the gravy to soften and help mix them), let boil two or three minutes, add a little chopped parsley and serve. Or, first fry the chicken brown in a little hot lard, take out chicken, add a table-spoon flour, and let cook a minute, stirring constantly; add a pint water (or stock if at hand), a little vinegar or Worcestershire sauce, season with salt and pepper; when it has boiled, remove from fire, strain, add the beaten yolk of an egg, pour over the chicken and serve. Or, put chicken in sauce-pan with barely enough water to cover, stew gently until tender; have a frying-pan prepared with a few slices of salt pork, drain chicken and fry with pork until it is a fine, rich brown; take chicken and bits of pork from the pan, pour in the broth, thicken with brown flour, mixed smooth with a little water, and season with pepper; now put chicken and pork back into gravy, let simmer a few minutes, and serve very hot.-Mrs. J. H. S.
Three variations on one method: gentle stewing followed by either a cream sauce, an egg-thickened brown gravy, or a fry-off with salt pork. All three are workable as written; the details below are where nineteenth-century assumptions differ from ours.
- Half pint of creamOne cup. A pint in this book is the standard 16 fl oz, so the second variation's "pint water" is also two cups.
- Cooking timeThe recipe gives no time, only "until tender," which probably reflects an older, tougher bird. A supermarket broiler cut into eight pieces is tender in 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer; breast pieces are done well before thighs, so pull them early.
- Barely enough waterThe small quantity presumably keeps the broth concentrated for the sauce. Cover the pieces by no more than half an inch, keep the lid on, and keep the liquid just trembling rather than rolling, or the meat shreds and dries.
- The egg yolkThe hinge of the second variation. It goes in off the heat, and the sauce must not return to a boil after it does or it will curdle into threads. Slacken the yolk with a spoonful of hot gravy first, then stir it back in.
- Brown flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until the colour of sand, a common nineteenth-century kitchen standby. It thickens less powerfully than raw flour, so allow a little extra, and it supplies the "rich brown" colour the third version is after.
- Lard and salt porkLard is still sold and behaves as intended; butter or a neutral oil works for the initial browning. If salt pork is unavailable, thick unsmoked bacon is the nearest thing — smoked bacon will dominate the dish.
- Beurre maniéThe butter-and-flour paste in the first version is added raw to hot liquid, so it needs the full two or three minutes at a boil to lose its pasty taste.
- YieldOne chicken, about four servings. All three versions want rice, mashed potato or biscuits to take the gravy.
Fricassee is a French term for meat cut up and cooked in liquid, then finished in a sauce made from that liquid — distinct from a roast or a plain stew in that the bird is jointed first and the cooking broth becomes the sauce. By the 1870s, when this Ohio compilation appeared, fricasseed chicken had been thoroughly naturalised in American cooking: the three variations here run from a plain cream gravy through an egg-thickened brown sauce to a frankly midwestern treatment with salt pork. The multiple options attributed to a single contributor are characteristic of Buckeye Cookery, which gathered submissions from housekeepers. Such a bird — tough, flavourful — would need an hour or more of moist heat, which is exactly what a fricassee provides and a roasting oven does not, though the recipe itself specifies nothing about the bird.