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Pickled Chicken
Boil four chickens till tender enough for meat to fall from bones; put meat in a stone jar, and pour over it three pints of cold vinegar, and a pint and half of the water in which the chickens were boiled; add spices if preferred, and it will be ready for use in two days.-Emma Gould Rea.
This is a room-temperature meat preserve of the kind that filled stone jars in unrefrigerated pantries, and it does not survive scrutiny as a keeping method. The notes below explain the units and the specific reasons the method fails.
- Why it fails: acidity is unmeasured and bufferedThree pints of vinegar against a pint and a half of chicken broth gives a nominal acid strength of roughly three percent at best, and the broth's dissolved protein, gelatin and salts buffer the mixture upward from there. Nothing in the recipe checks pH, and boned meat sitting above the liquid line is not acidified at all. A safe pickle for meat needs verified acidity throughout, not a ratio guessed at the jar.
- Why it fails: no storage temperatureThe instruction is simply that it will be ready in two days, with no direction to chill. Cooked chicken and its stock held at pantry temperature in a marginally acid brine is a growth medium for organisms such as Listeria and Staphylococcus aureus, and any meat sitting above the liquid line is not protected at all. The original readers accepted a level of spoilage risk that no current guidance permits.
- Why it fails: an open, porous vesselA nineteenth-century stone jar was glazed stoneware or earthenware, usually closed with a cloth, plate or paper rather than with a seal. The recipe calls for no sterilising and no seal against recontamination, and there is no processing step of any kind after the boil.
- Period vinegar was not modern vinegarHousehold vinegar in 1877 was frequently cider vinegar of unknown and variable strength, sometimes homemade and well under five percent. Any calculation of the finished acidity from the printed proportions is guesswork, which is precisely the problem.
- The units, for readingThree pints is six cups; a pint and a half is three cups. A gill, which appears elsewhere in this book, is half a cup. The recipe does not state a size for its "four chickens," though period birds were generally smaller than a modern supermarket roaster.
- If you want the dishSouse and pickled chicken in the modern sense are refrigerated dishes made to a tested formula. Use a current recipe from a reliable source rather than adapting this one.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of an Ohio church-society compilation, and its poultry chapter is a good index of what a household did with birds killed all at once: roast what you eat today, and put the rest into fat, salt or vinegar. Pickled or "soused" chicken belongs to the same family as souse, head cheese and pickled pigs' feet, all of them ways of holding cooked meat in an acid bath through a season without ice. The signature is typical of the book, which was assembled from named contributions by many women, so that a recipe carries a neighbour's authority rather than an author's; Emma Gould Rea's version is unusually spare even by those standards, leaving spices, salt and keeping conditions entirely to the cook's judgment.