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FOWL (a la Remoulade)
Truss a fine fowl for boiling, lay sliced lemon on its breast, and tie slices of bacon over all. Put it into a stewpan with some good stock, and put with it into a stewpan with some good stock, and put with it a carrot, an onion, and a bunch of sweet herbs. Let it stew gently till done enough. Take it out, and when cold cut it up into convenient-sized pieces. Place all in a salad-dish, with a sauce made of two hard-boiled yolks of eggs, rubbed till smooth, and mixed with salt and pepper, five large spoonfuls of oil, and two of tarragon vinegar. Garnish with French beans and slices of hard-boiled egg intermixed. Probable cost, 7s. or 8s. Sufficient for six persons.
A cold poached chicken dressed with an egg-yolk sauce — a Victorian summer dish that reads oddly only because the printer set one line twice. Ignore the repeated "put it into a stewpan with some good stock"; the fowl goes into the pan once.
- The birdA "fine fowl" for boiling was typically a mature hen, tougher and more flavourful than a modern roaster. A 4–5 lb whole chicken works as a substitute; a large boiling fowl, if you can find one, wants longer and rewards it with better broth.
- Poaching, not boiling"Stew gently till done enough" means barely trembling liquid — around 180F. About 1 to 1¼ hours for a 4–5 lb chicken, until the thigh reads 165F. A rolling boil will shred the breast and cloud the stock.
- Cover the birdThe recipe says only "some good stock" and does not specify how far up the fowl it should come. The lemon slices under the bacon help protect the breast, so keep the bacon in place until you lift the bird out.
- Cool it in the liquidThe recipe says only "when cold." Let the fowl cool in its stock for an hour, then refrigerate; carving warm chicken for a cold dish gives dry, ragged meat. Chill covered and use within two days.
- Spoonfuls"Five large spoonfuls of oil, and two of tarragon vinegar" means tablespoons — roughly 5 tbsp oil to 2 tbsp vinegar, a sharper ratio than a modern vinaigrette. Sieve the hard yolks rather than mashing them, then work the oil in gradually so the sauce thickens instead of separating.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth buying for this; white wine vinegar with a bruised sprig of tarragon steeped in it for a day is a fair stand-in. Here it supplies much of the sauce's character.
- French beansGreen beans, topped and tailed, blanched 3–4 minutes and refreshed in cold water so they stay bright. Dress them only lightly or they will muddy the plate.
- Cost and yield"7s. or 8s." is seven or eight shillings, a substantial sum for a household dish in the 1870s. Six servings as written, as a cold main course.
- Keep the stockThe poaching liquid, strained, is excellent broth. Nothing in this recipe uses it.
Rémoulade here means a cold sauce built on hard-boiled egg yolk, oil and a sharp herb vinegar — closer to what we would now call a sauce gribiche than to the mustardy mayonnaise sold under the name today, or the pink Louisiana version. The dish is of a kind that suited a household with a larder rather than refrigeration: a fowl poached in the morning, allowed to go cold, and dressed at the last minute for a supper table or a summer luncheon. The bacon-and-lemon wrapping is a technique for protecting pale meat during long gentle cooking. That the printer duplicated a clause, and that nobody corrected it, is a small reminder of how quickly these vast Victorian dictionaries were compiled — Cassell's ran to thousands of entries, many of them lightly adapted from French sources.