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FOWL (a la Hollandaise)
Take out the breast-bone of a large but young fowl, and fill up the space with a forcemeat composed of the following ingredients. Half a pint of bread-crumbs, an ounce and a half of finely-shredded suet or butter, a small par-boiled onion, or a few oysters, bearded, and cut not too small, pepper, salt, and an egg to bind. Make a batter as for fritters, and when the fowl has roasted half its time, pour the batter over, and when dry, pour on more; repeat until it is thickly coated, and of a nice brown colour. Serve with melted butter and lemon pickle. While roasting, a thickly buttered paper should be fastened over the fowl, and only removed when the batter is used. Time, one hour altogether. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A stuffed roast chicken built up with successive layers of fritter batter — the batter is the whole point, and it is the part most likely to defeat a modern oven.
- The hinge: thin coats, fully setEach layer of batter must dry and firm before the next goes on, or the lot slides into the pan. Brush or ladle on very thin films and allow each several minutes to set; the recipe only begins the batter at half time, so expect as many thin coats as the remaining roasting time allows rather than two thick ones.
- Fire versus ovenCoatings like this suit an open, radiant heat where dripping batter falls clear and the surface dries fast; the recipe gives no oven setting. In a closed oven, roast on a rack over a shallow tray at about 400F so the coating sets rather than steams, and accept a less even crust.
- Half a pint of bread-crumbsAbout 1 1/4 cups (an imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz), loosely packed, of dry crumbs. An ounce and a half of suet or butter is about 3 tablespoons; the recipe offers either, and shredded beef suet gives a drier, more open forcemeat than butter.
- Suet and bearded oystersBeef suet is a butcher's order or a boxed shredded product; butter works but makes a denser stuffing. "Bearded" oysters have the frill of gill tissue trimmed off — use small shucked oysters, cut in halves at most, and add them raw so they cook in the forcemeat rather than toughening.
- Boning the breastThe recipe removes the breast-bone simply to make a hollow for the forcemeat; it needs a sharp boning knife and patience. Filling the body cavity instead works, though the bird will look and slice quite differently.
- Time and temperatureOne hour total is right only for a small bird of 3 lb or so. Go by a thermometer: 165F in the thigh and in the centre of the forcemeat, which for a stuffed 4-5 lb chicken usually means 80-95 minutes.
- The buttered paperA greased sheet of parchment tied over the breast is the period version of a foil tent, and it does the same job. Take it off before the first coat of batter goes on, as the recipe directs.
- Melted butter and lemon pickle"Melted butter" here is the standard Victorian butter sauce — a light flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply clarified butter. Lemon pickle was a spiced, salted lemon preserve; preserved lemons, finely chopped, stand in for it acceptably.
- YieldThree or four as written, and that assumes other dishes on the table.
Coating a roasting bird with batter is often traced to the era of the open fire and the turning spit, when a cook could build up a crust layer by layer much as a Yorkshire pudding was set beneath the dripping joint. The technique did two things at once: it protected lean flesh from scorching and it produced a crisp, savoury shell that took the place of a pastry crust for households not making a pie. The forcemeat is entirely of its period \, egf, egg to bind — with oysters offered as the casual alternative to an onion, a reminder that in nineteenth-century Britain oysters were cheap enough to be a stuffing ingredient rather than a luxury. Cassell's, published for the middle-class household of the 1870s onward, collected dishes like this at the point where they were passing from open-hearth practice into the closed range, which is why the instructions read as slightly impossible in a modern oven.