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Chicken, Fried
Take the remains of a cold chicken, cut it into neat joints, salt and pepper these rather highly, and strew over them finely-chopped onion and parsley. Cover them with oil, and squeeze over them the juice of a lemon. Turn the pieces every now and then, and let them remain until they have imbibed the flavour, then dip them in flour, and fry in hot butter or lard. Put a breakfast-cupful of good stock into a saucepan, with a moderate-sized onion stuck with two cloves, a bay-leaf, a little salt and pepper, the juice of a lemon, and a little parsley and tarragon chopped small. Let this sauce boil well, and then strain it. Serve the pieces of chicken piled up on a dish, covered with a napkin, and garnished with fried parsley, and send the above sauce, or, if preferred, tomato sauce, to table in a tureen. Probable cost, 4d., exclusive of the chicken. Sufficient for three persons.
This is a leftovers dish: cold roast chicken revived by a marinade, a flour coat and hot fat. Nothing in it is difficult, but a few Victorian conventions need translating.
- Start with cooked chickenThe joints are already cooked, so the frying is for colour and crispness, not for cooking through. Three to four minutes a side in fat hot enough to sizzle on contact is plenty; longer dries the meat out.
- How long to marinateThe original says only "until they have imbibed the flavour." An hour at room temperature or three to four hours refrigerated should be enough for the oil, lemon, onion and parsley to register; a very long soak in the lemon juice may soften the surface of the meat.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup in British books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Take it as somewhere between 250 and 285 ml of stock, which reduces to a thin, sharp sauce rather than a gravy.
- The sauce is a broth, not a thickened gravyStock, an onion clouté, bay, lemon juice and herbs, boiled and strained, gives a clear seasoned liquid. If you want it to cling, reduce it by a third or mount it with a knob of butter off the heat; the book does not thicken it at all.
- Dry the joints before flouringLift them out of the oil marinade and pat them, then flour. Wet, oily pieces shed their coating in the pan and the loose flour burns in the fat.
- Fried parsleyVery dry parsley sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing and turn a vivid dark green. Wet parsley will spit violently, so shake it out thoroughly first.
- The napkinThe recipe has the joints piled on a dish and covered with a napkin. Fried food was commonly sent to table on or under a folded napkin, which took up some of the fat as well as dressing the dish. A rack or a warm dish lined with paper keeps the coating crisp.
- YieldStated as sufficient for three persons. Reckon on a bird of about 3 lb serving two to three as a main course now.
Cassell's places this among the standard uses for "the remains of a cold chicken" — a category that occupies a great deal of space in Victorian cookery books, where a roast bird was expected to reappear in two or three later forms rather than be eaten at one sitting. The technique here, marinating meat in oil, lemon, onion and herbs before flouring and frying, is what English writers of the period generally called a marinade in the French manner, and much the same treatment was applied to fried veal and lamb cutlets. The costing of fourpence "exclusive of the chicken" is the point of the whole entry: the bird is already paid for, and the dish makes a second dinner out of oil, a lemon, a cupful of stock and some herbs. The onion stuck with cloves, still a fixture of French stock-making as an oignon clouté, was routine enough in nineteenth-century kitchens that the book does not bother to name the technique.