Home › The Principles of Cookery › FOWL (a la Franoise)
FOWL (a la Franoise)
Remove the breastbones from a couple of fine fowls, and draw the strings from the legs; truss them as for boiling. Mix some lemon-juice with a lump of butter, which insert in the fowls before placing them into a stewpan, then cover them with strips of fat bacon, cut very thin. Make a sauce as follows. Cut equal quantities of veal and fat bacon, one pound of each, into dice, with enough ham to flavour. Fry the meat, without browning it, in a good quantity of butter, season with salt, pepper, and add a clove, half a bay-leaf, a few springs of parsley, and a little thyme, with as much boiling water as will be required for gravy to stew the fowls. Stew till the flavour of the herbs is extracted, then strain into the stewpan. Heap red cinders on the cover of the stewpan, and keep a very slow fire underneath. When sufficiently done, drain, and serve the fowls with rich brown sauce, and a scarlet tongue between them. Time, three-quarters of an hour to stew the fowls. Probable cost, 7s. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A Victorian braise dressed up as a set piece: two birds cooked gently under bacon in a rich veal-and-ham stock, then served with a whole tongue laid between them. Most of the work is in the braising liquid, and most of the confusion is in the vessel.
- The hinge: cinders on the lidHeaping hot cinders on the cover with a slow fire beneath is heat from above and below with almost none from the sides — a brick oven improvised on the hearth. A heavy lidded casserole in a low oven, around 325F, comes close, and the fowls should never be allowed to come to more than the barest tremble.
- "Fowls" are not roasting chickensA Victorian fowl is a mature laying bird, tough and deeply flavoured. A supermarket chicken of 3 to 4 lb will stand in, but the flavour of the finished dish then rests almost entirely on the veal and ham stock. If you can find a boiling fowl, it wants two hours or more, not the stated time.
- The stated time is shortThree-quarters of an hour is optimistic even for young birds, and dangerously so for the old ones the recipe assumes. Cook until the thigh reaches 165F and the leg joint moves freely; with a true boiling fowl expect to double or triple the time.
- Removing the breastboneThe breastbone is taken out so the birds sit flat and carve into neat slices. Work a boning knife along either side of the keel from inside the cavity and lift it clear, leaving the skin intact. "Drawing the strings from the legs" means pulling the leg tendons, which a poulterer will do on request.
- The sauce is a braising fond, not a sauceA pound each of veal and fat bacon plus ham, sweated in butter without colour and simmered with the aromatics, gives a strong stock that is strained over the birds. It is not what goes to table: the finished dish calls separately for a rich brown sauce, so reduce and finish the strained braising liquid, or make an espagnole alongside.
- Scarlet tongueAn ox tongue cured with salt and saltpetre, which turns it pink, then boiled and pressed. Buy it ready cooked and pressed from a butcher or deli rather than curing one; sliced cold, it is a garnish of colour as much as flavour.
- Bacon stripsThe thin sheets of fat bacon laid over the birds are a barding, standing in for larding fat. Use unsmoked streaky bacon or, better, sheets of pork back fat, since modern smoked bacon will dominate the delicate stock.
- Cost and yieldSeven shillings was a substantial outlay for a late-Victorian household — this is a dish for a dinner party, not a weeknight. It serves seven or eight, and both birds are needed for the presentation with the tongue laid between them.
The heading is most likely a corruption of à la Française, and the method is straightforwardly French: something close to a white braise, in which meat is cooked under barding fat in a well-flavoured stock so that it stays pale and moist rather than roasting to a crust. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in late-Victorian London, ran to thousands of entries and drew heavily on the French repertoire that is generally said to have shaped English upper-middle-class dinner tables from Carême's time onward — hence the shelf of fowl recipes here labelled à la this and à la that. The instruction to heap red cinders on the lid dates the text to a kitchen that still worked partly at the open range, where controlling heat meant moving fuel rather than turning a dial. The scarlet tongue laid between the two birds belongs to the same period taste for a dish that reads as a composition on the platter, colour and symmetry counting for as much as the eating.