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CHICKEN (en Matelote)
Cut a fine chicken into neat joints. Put a quarter of a pound of fresh butter into a stewpan, and when it is hot fry the pieces of chicken in it till they are lightly browned, then lift them out and put them aside until wanted. Fry in the butter six small onions sliced, a large carrot cut into quarters, a parsnip also quartered, and a dozen small mushrooms. Pour over these sufficient stock to cover them, add some savoury herbs, a blade of mace, a tea-spoonful of salt, and a salt-spoonful of pepper, and simmer all gently together until the sauce is richly flavoured. Strain it and thicken it with a little brown thickening, pour into it a glass of claret, and simmer it gently until it is smooth and thick. Put in the chicken, mix with the sauce the liver of the chicken pounded, a boned anchovy, and half a tea-spoonful of bruised capers. Simmer a quarter of an hour longer, and serve. Time, one hour and a half. Probable cost of chicken, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A brown fricassee dressed up as a fish stew: the vegetables are cooked only to flavour the sauce and then strained out, so nothing is wasted on them beyond their juices. The hinge is the thickening and the wine, which need to simmer together until smooth before the chicken goes back in.
- Brown thickeningVictorian shorthand for a brown roux — flour cooked in butter or drippings until nut-coloured, and often kept in a jar to be whisked in by the spoonful. Around 1 oz each of butter and flour, cooked to a hazelnut brown, will thicken the amount of stock used here, which the recipe leaves to the cook ('sufficient stock to cover them').
- ClaretIn Britain this generally meant red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red will do; 'a glass' in a nineteenth-century kitchen book means a wineglassful, usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, rather than a modern tumbler.
- Salt-spoonfulAbout a quarter of a teaspoon. With an anchovy, capers and a seasoned stock also going in, hold back on the teaspoonful of salt until the sauce is strained and tasted.
- Blade of maceA whole strip of the dried aril of nutmeg, not ground mace. One blade is worth about a quarter teaspoon ground, though the flavour is cleaner; it comes out with the vegetables when the sauce is strained.
- Boned anchovySalt-packed anchovies were sold whole and needed rinsing and filleting. Two oil-packed fillets, mashed, give the same savoury depth; they should dissolve into the sauce rather than sit in it.
- The pounded liverThe liver is a thickener and enricher, not a garnish. Work it to a paste with a little of the hot sauce before stirring it in, and do not let the sauce boil hard afterwards or it will go grainy.
- TimingThe stated hour and a half covers the whole process, most of it the vegetable stock. The chicken itself is browned, then returned for a final quarter hour — modern birds have larger, leaner breasts, so joint them and add the breast pieces later than the legs if you want them juicy.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, from a bird the book prices at 2s. 6d. The recipe specifies only 'a fine chicken'; something around 3½–4 lb would suit.
Matelote comes from the French matelot, sailor, and properly describes a boatman's stew of freshwater fish — eel, carp, pike — cooked in red wine with small onions and mushrooms. By the nineteenth century English cookery writers had loosened the name from the fish and applied it to dishes finished in that wine-and-onion manner, so chicken, rabbit and even eggs turn up en matelote in the household dictionaries. The anchovy and capers here look more like the English kitchen than the French one: a savoury, faintly sharp note common in Victorian brown sauces, and a habit generally traced back to the ketchups and store sauces of the eighteenth century. The book's format — time, probable cost, sufficient for — is that of Cassell's, which kept the French title while writing the method for a cook working from a stewpan and a jar of brown thickening.