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Fried Spring Chicken
Put skillet on the stove with about half table-spoon each of lard and butter; when hot lay in chicken, sprinkle over with flour, salt and pepper, place lid on skillet, and cook over a moderate fire; when a light brown, turn the chicken and sprinkle flour, salt and pepper over the top as at first, if necessary add more lard and butter, and cook slowly until done; make gravy just the same as for baked chicken. As a general rule half an hour is long enough to fry spring chicken. To make rich and nice gravy without cream, take the yolk of an egg, beat up light, strain and stir slowly into the gravy after the flour and milk have been stirred in and thoroughly cooked; as soon as it boils up the gravy is done, and should be removed from the stove. All gravies need to be stirred well and thoroughly cooked over a moderate fire. - Mrs. L. H.
A pan-fried cut-up chicken with a pan gravy thickened at the end with egg yolk. The method is sound; the main adjustment is the bird itself, since a modern broiler is far larger than the spring chicken this was written for.
- What a spring chicken wasA young bird, generally reckoned at a couple of pounds or less, from the spring hatch and killed at a few months old — closer to today's poussin or a small game hen than a supermarket broiler. If you use a standard 3-4 lb chicken cut into eight pieces, expect 35-45 minutes, not thirty.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockThe half-hour rule assumed a very small bird. Take breast pieces to 165F and thighs and drumsticks to 175F, where the connective tissue has softened. Pull the white meat as it finishes and let the dark meat go on.
- "A moderate fire"Medium to medium-low on a modern burner. The lid means the chicken partly steams as it browns, so the heat must stay low enough that the flour on the surface toasts rather than scorches.
- Fat quantityHalf a tablespoon each of lard and butter is barely a film — right for one small bird in a small skillet. For a full cut-up chicken in a 12-inch pan, use about a tablespoon of each, and be ready to add more when you turn the pieces, as the recipe allows.
- Flouring in the panSprinkling flour over the chicken as it cooks, rather than dredging beforehand, gives a thinner crust and leaves toasted flour in the fat to start the gravy. Sprinkle evenly and lightly; clumps will stay raw-tasting.
- The egg yolk gravyThis is the hinge. Cook the flour and milk out fully first, then temper the beaten yolk with a few spoonfuls of hot gravy before it goes into the pan, and stir constantly. "As soon as it boils up" is the outside limit — held at a boil, the yolk curdles and the gravy turns grainy.
- Lid on, then offThe recipe puts the lid on and never mentions removing it, which leaves the crust soft. Cover for the first stretch to cook the pieces through, then finish the last five minutes uncovered to crisp the surface.
- YieldA bird this small would stretch to two, perhaps three. A cut-up 3-4 lb bird with the gravy serves four.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio, appeared in 1877, a retitled and revised version of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book of 1876. It is a compilation cookbook: many entries carry initials rather than full names, as this one does, because the recipes were gathered from contributing housewives. The book's poultry chapter assumes a household that raised its own birds, and "spring chicken" was a calendar term before it was a culinary one — surplus cockerels from the spring hatch, killed young in early summer while the hens were kept for laying. Frying was what you did with a bird too small and too tender to be worth roasting. The egg-yolk enrichment at the end is a frugal touch of the same order, and the recipe says as much: it is there "to make rich and nice gravy without cream," a single yolk supplying the body and colour cream would have given.