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Chicken, Baked, in Rice
Cut a chicken into neat joints, and season each with pepper, salt, and a very little pounded mace. Place some slices of bacon at the bottom of a deep dish, lay the chicken upon it, strew over it a finely-minced onion, pour a breakfast-cupful of veal stock over all, and pile up the dish with boiled rice. Put a cover on, and bake for an hour. Probable cost of chicken, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A one-dish bake that assumes a cook with veal stock and cold boiled rice already on hand. The original gives no oven temperature and no lid instruction beyond "put a cover on", which is where most of the trouble lies.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, and no oven term is used here; a moderate oven, around 350F/175C, is a reasonable modern equivalent. An hour at that heat suits bone-in chicken joints; take the thickest piece to 165F/74C at the bone.
- Seal the dishThe hinge of the recipe. The rice is already boiled and there is only a cupful of liquid, so any steam that escapes leaves you with a dry, crusted top. Use a tight lid, or foil crimped hard over the rim, and only lift it in the last ten minutes if you want colour.
- A breakfast-cupfulUsually reckoned at about 10 fl oz, so roughly 1 1/4 cups, though the measure was never standardised. If your boiled rice is on the dry side, err toward a full 1 1/2 cups of stock.
- Veal stockRarely sold now. A good unsalted chicken stock is the closest match; if you want the gelatine and neutral sweetness of veal, a light beef or roasted-bone stock diluted by a third gets near it.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself. "A very little pounded" means a scant quarter-teaspoon of ground mace for a whole bird; it is easy to overdo.
- The baconPeriod bacon was generally saltier and fattier than most modern rashers. Use unsmoked streaky or pancetta, and hold back on the salt in the seasoning until you know how salty the bacon is.
- Jointing"Neat joints" would in practice mean two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings and the breast halved across; the recipe gives no bird size, but something around 3 to 4 lb suits the stated yield. Skin-on pieces sit better under the rice than boneless meat, which will overcook well before the hour is up.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, and that holds — the rice makes it stretch. It is unlikely to reheat well, the grains having been cooked twice.
Cassell's belongs to the era when rice was an established household ingredient in Britain rather than a curiosity, helped along by the Indian connection and by Carolina and Patna rice arriving through the ports. Dishes of this type — meat laid in a deep dish, buried in boiled rice and baked under a cover — invite comparison with the pilau, stripped of its spicing down to a whisper of mace and an onion. The instruction to use boiled rice presumes rice already cooked, whether the day before or that morning, though the recipe itself says nothing about leftovers or about stretching the dish. The costing in shillings and pence is standard for the book, which gave prices for households budgeting as much as for cooks working the range.