Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs and Gravy, with Stewed Fowl
Eggs and Gravy, with Stewed Fowl
Put a young well-fed fowl into a stewpan with four ounces of butter, some spice, a faggot of herbs, and half a dozen small onions, let it brown slightly and equally; add half a pint of stock, close the lid tightly, and finish the cooking over a very slow fire. Parboil the liver of the fowl in some good gravy, remove it, and poach half a dozen eggs in the same liquor. Rub down the liver to a paste, and use it to thicken the gravy in which the fowl has been stewed. Place the fowl on a hot dish, with balls of spinach round it; lay a poached egg on each ball, flattening it with the back of the slice; pour the gravy over the bird, and serve hot. Time, one hour to stew the fowl.
A pot-roasted bird finished with a liver-thickened gravy and a garnish of spinach and poached eggs. The gravy is the hinge: the liver purée thickens it but will curdle if it boils.
- The liver liaisonRub the parboiled liver through a fine sieve rather than mashing it, then whisk it into the stewing liquor off the heat and warm it gently without boiling. Boiled liver purée goes grainy and splits, which ruins the sauce the whole dish is built on.
- What "fowl" meansIn Victorian usage "fowl" usually meant a full-grown bird rather than a spring chicken, though this recipe specifies a *young* well-fed fowl, which is why an hour of slow stewing is thought enough. A supermarket bird of 3-4 lb is the practical substitute; an older boiling fowl will need considerably longer.
- Cook to temperatureOne hour in a tightly lidded pan over a low flame is a guide, not a guarantee. Take the thickest part of the thigh to 165F/74C before serving.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. With the lid sealed tight it is enough; if the pan runs dry before the bird is done, add stock rather than water.
- A faggot of herbsA bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, tucked in whole and lifted out at the end. What the original calls "some spice" is left unspecified; mace, peppercorns or cloves would all fit the period, but the recipe does not say.
- Very slow fireThe barest simmer, so the surface trembles rather than bubbles. The original cooks this on the stove with the lid closed tight; a very low oven can hold the heat more steadily if your burner will not go low enough.
- Poaching in gravyThree minutes in barely simmering liquor gives a set white and a soft yolk. Note that the recipe keeps the two liquids separate: the eggs and liver are cooked in "some good gravy", while the sauce is the liquor the fowl was stewed in.
- Spinach ballsCook the spinach, then squeeze it hard in a cloth before shaping; wet spinach will slump and thin the gravy on the plate. Six eggs and six balls to a bird suggests four to six servings.
Cassell's belongs to the late-Victorian tradition of English cookery written under heavy French influence, and this dish shows it: the technique is a straightforward *poêlé* or pot-roast, and the thickening with a sieved liver is a liaison of the kind French cooks used for *civet* and game sauces. The garnish of spinach rounds each crowned with a poached egg is pure period plating — the eggs are structural decoration as much as food, arranged around the bird. Recipes of this sort assumed a bird whose liver came attached, an assumption that quietly disappeared with the arrival of the dressed, chilled, uniformly young chicken.