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Chicken, Roast
Young spring chickens should be very carefully prepared for roasting, as the flesh is so tender that it will easily tear. They require no stuffing. A little butter placed inside is an improvement. They should be firmly trussed like a fowl, slightly floured, put down to a clear fire, and basted constantly until ready. Bread sauce, mushroom, egg, or chestnut sauce may all be served with roast chicken. If the fire is too fierce a piece of oiled paper may be fastened over the breast of the bird whilst it is down. Time to roast, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. each. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is spit-roasting before an open fire, written for a bird far smaller than a modern supermarket chicken. Translating it means translating both the bird and the heat source.
- What a "spring chicken" wasA young bird, far smaller than a modern roasting chicken and closer in size to what is now sold as a poussin, though the entry gives neither weight nor age. A standard 3.5-4 lb roasting chicken is a different animal and will not cook in half an hour.
- The fire becomes an oven"Put down to a clear fire" means suspended or spitted in front of glowing coals with no smoke or flame. The entry specifies no oven setting; in an oven, a hot setting of around 425F is a reasonable modern stand-in for a bird this small, and the half-hour timing may hold roughly for a poussin.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThe one thing the original cannot tell you. Take the bird to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, clear of bone. A poussin can pass from underdone to dry in a few minutes.
- Oiled paperA sheet of paper brushed with oil or dripping, tied over the breast to shield it from radiant heat. Buttered parchment or loosely tented foil does the same job in an oven, removed for the last ten minutes to let the skin colour.
- Basting and the flourConstant basting mattered because a spitted bird had no enclosed moist air around it. In an oven, baste two or three times at most — opening the door repeatedly costs more than the basting gains. The light dusting of flour helps the skin brown and crisp.
- Butter inside, no stuffingSound advice worth keeping. A small bird stuffed will be overcooked at the breast before the stuffing is safe; a lump of butter with a little thyme or lemon peel is enough.
- The saucesBread sauce (milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with crumbs), mushroom, egg (a béchamel with chopped hard-boiled egg), or chestnut. All are made separately from the bird.
- Cost and yieldTwo shillings and sixpence apiece was a real expense in the later nineteenth century. The entry reckons one bird for two or three people; reckon on half a poussin per person, or a whole one for a large appetite.
The distinction the entry draws between a "chicken" and a "fowl" is the one that has since collapsed: a chicken meant a young bird for roasting, a fowl an older laying hen destined for boiling or the stockpot, and the two were priced and cooked quite differently. Spring chickens were seasonal and expensive, sold small, which fits both the half-hour cooking time and the note that one bird stretches to only two or three people. The oiled paper over the breast is the ancestor of the foil tent, and the warning about a fierce fire is a reminder that the cook controlled heat by moving and screening the bird, not by turning a dial.