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Chicken, Fricasseed
Choose a fresh, tender chicken. Draw, singe and skin it, then cut it into neat joints. Soak these joints in cold water for fifteen minutes, drain them, and put them into a saucepan, with a bunch of savoury herbs, an onion stuck with two cloves, a tea-spoonful of salt, and half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and enough water to cover them. Bring the liquid to a boil, remove the scum as it rises, and simmer very gently for half an hour, or until the meat is sufficiently cooked. When this point is reached, further boiling will spoil the flavour. Put two ounces of butter, two ounces of flour, and a dessert-spoonful of mushroom powder into a stewpan. Stir the mixture about until it is quite smooth, but do not let it brown; add, gradually, a pint and a half of the liquor in which the chicken was boiled, and simmer gently for half an hour. Put the pieces of chicken into a saucepan with a little of the sauce, and let them warm gently. Thicken the remainder of the sauce with the yolks of three eggs well beaten, and a piece of butter about the size of a walnut; drawing the sauce from the fire before adding them. The sauce must not boil after the eggs are added. Put the chicken into a dish, pour the sauce over, and take stewed mushrooms to table on a separate dish. Time, one hour and a half. Probable cost of chicken, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A white fricassee in the classic English manner: the bird is poached, the poaching liquor becomes a blond velouté, and egg yolks finish it off the heat. The recipe is sound as written; most of what needs translating is vocabulary and one point of technique.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the beaten yolks go in, the sauce must never reach a simmer or it will curdle into scrambled egg suspended in broth. Pull the pan well off the heat, temper a ladle of hot sauce into the yolks first, then return the mixture and stir over the barest heat until it coats a spoon, around 180F.
- Mushroom powderDried mushrooms ground fine; recipes for it appear in Victorian cookery books as a savoury seasoning. Dried porcini or a mixed dried mushroom blitzed in a spice grinder gives the same thing. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons.
- Draw and singeDrawing means removing the innards and singeing means burning off residual feather stubs over a flame. A supermarket chicken arrives done. Skinning the joints is still worth doing: in a white fricassee the skin will not crisp and only makes the sauce greasy.
- Jointing and quantityThe recipe gives no weight; a bird of about 3 to 3½ lb, cut into eight or ten pieces, suits the stated yield of four. The 15-minute cold soak appears intended to draw out blood and keep the meat pale; it can be skipped now without harm.
- Do not overcook the poachThe warning that further boiling spoils the flavour is accurate. Thirty minutes at a bare tremble is enough for breast pieces; legs may want ten minutes more, so lift the breast out first if the pieces cook unevenly.
- The rouxTwo ounces of butter is about 4 tablespoons; two ounces of flour is nearer half a cup. Cook it two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste but keep it pale — the recipe is explicit that it must not brown.
- LiquorA pint and a half is Imperial: about 30 fl oz, roughly 850 ml, or a little over 3½ US cups. If the poaching liquor falls short, top up with chicken stock rather than water.
- Butter the size of a walnutAn imprecise period measure, usually reckoned somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce (1 to 2 tablespoons). Stirred in at the end off the heat, it gives the sauce gloss.
- YieldFour as a main course, with rice or plain boiled potatoes and the stewed mushrooms served separately as directed. The 2s. 6d. costing is Victorian and of interest only as a period detail.
Fricassee comes from the French fricasser, whose origin is disputed — it is often explained as a compound of frire (to fry) and casser (to break up) — and by the eighteenth century the dish was thoroughly domesticated in England, appearing in Hannah Glasse as a matter of course rather than as a foreign novelty. The defining feature is that the meat is never browned: it is poached pale, and its own cooking liquor is turned into a velouté enriched with egg yolks, a technique known in French kitchens as a liaison. Mushroom powder and stewed mushrooms on the side reflect the Victorian habit of layering a single flavour through a dish, and the careful costing at the end is typical of a book written for households keeping accounts.