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Steamed Chicken
Rub the chicken on the inside with pepper and half tea-spoon of salt, place in steamer in a kettle that will keep it as near the water as possible, cover, and steam an hour and a half; when done keep hot while dressing is prepared, then cut them up, arrange on the platter, and serve with the dressing over them. The dressing is made as follows: Boil one pint of gravy from the kettle without the fat, add cayenne pepper and half a tea-spoon salt; stir six tablespoons of flour into a quarter pint of cream until smooth, and add to the gravy. Corn starch may be used instead of the flour, and some add nutmeg or celery salt.
A plain steamed fowl with a cream velouté made from the steaming liquid. Two things need attention: the thickener, which is proportioned for a much larger bird than most people cook, and the doneness test, which the original leaves to the clock.
- The hinge: thin the flourSix tablespoons of flour into a quarter pint (half a cup) of cream gives a paste, not a slurry, and it will seize into lumps the moment it meets hot liquid. Two to three tablespoons of flour per pint of liquid is enough for a pouring sauce; whisk it into the cold cream until perfectly smooth, then temper with a ladle of hot broth before it goes into the pan.
- Cornstarch is not a one-for-one swapWhere the recipe offers cornstarch "instead of the flour," use about half as much by volume, and stop cooking once it clears and thickens. Held at a boil it thins back out.
- "Gravy from the kettle"This is the water under the steamer, enriched by drippings — closer to a weak broth than gravy. Salt it and reduce it, or start the kettle with stock rather than plain water; otherwise the sauce tastes of little but cream and flour.
- Steaming setupA metal colander or folding steamer basket in a deep stockpot works. Keeping the bird "as near the water as possible" means maximum steam contact, but the water must not touch the chicken or it poaches instead; check the level partway through and top up with boiling water.
- Time and temperatureNinety minutes suits a large fowl; the recipe never states a weight. A modern 3½ lb chicken is generally done in 55–70 minutes; go by 165°F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, rather than the clock.
- Seasoning inside onlyThe pepper and salt go in the cavity, which seasons the bird barely at all. Salt the outside as well, or dry-brine it a few hours ahead, since steaming will not brown or concentrate the surface.
- Cayenne, unmeasuredStart with a pinch — an eighth teaspoon per pint — and correct at the end. Nutmeg, if used, wants a scant grating; celery salt means cutting back on the half teaspoon of salt.
- YieldOne chicken with about a pint and a quarter of sauce serves four, with the carved pieces sauced on the platter as directed. Steamed skin is pale and soft; anyone who wants it crisp should brown the pieces briefly under a broiler before saucing.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, compiled from contributions gathered as a church fundraiser, and it treats steaming as the plain, thrifty alternative to roasting: no oven to heat, no fat to spend, and a pot of broth left behind to become the sauce. Steamed fowl also had a second life in nineteenth-century invalid and convalescent cookery, where boiled and steamed white meat was thought gentler than roasted, and dressings like this one — broth thickened with flour and cream, seasoned with nothing sharper than cayenne and nutmeg — belong to that same restrained tradition. The word "dressing" here means the sauce poured over the carved bird, not a bread stuffing; the term carried both senses in American usage of the period.