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FOWL (a la Tartare)
Split open a large fowl into halves, and press it flat into a dish of clarified butter, the feet having been previously taken off and the legs bent in. In ten minutes fry it in butter a pale brown, cool, then cover with fine bread-crumbs and beaten egg. Dip the fowl once more into the clarified butter and broil over a slow fire, taking care that it does not burn. It should be turned often. Serve with a brown gravy, flavoured with lemon-juice, and send sauce a la Tartare (see TARTAR SAUCE) to table in a tureen. Time, twenty minutes to broil. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian way of grilling a chicken: split, part-cooked in butter, crumbed and finished slowly over coals. The whole method hangs on gentle, patient heat, and on the bird actually reaching a safe temperature before the crust darkens.
- "Broil" means grill over coalsIn this book broiling is done on a gridiron over a fire, not under an oven element. A charcoal or gas grill set up for indirect, moderate heat is the closest equivalent; if you use an oven broiler, keep the rack low and expect to move the bird about constantly.
- Split the bird properlyHalving through the breast and back, with the drumsticks tucked in, is what the recipe asks for; spatchcocking (removing the backbone and flattening whole) gives the same even thickness and is easier to turn. The original calls only for a "large fowl" and says it is sufficient for four persons; a 3–4 lb chicken is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- The dish of clarified butterThis reads as a soaking bath rather than a cooking step: "In ten minutes fry it" most likely means leave the flattened halves in the butter for ten minutes and then fry, rather than fry for ten minutes, though the phrasing is ambiguous. Clarified butter is simply butter with the milk solids and water removed; ghee works unchanged.
- Crumbs and egg, in that orderAs written the bird is covered with "fine bread-crumbs and beaten egg", in that order, though the phrasing may simply be naming both rather than fixing a sequence. Modern practice — egg first, then crumbs — gives a coating far less likely to slide off on the grill bars. Either way, the second dip in clarified butter helps brown the crust.
- The temperature that mattersTwenty minutes of slow broiling will not reliably cook a large split chicken through, even after the initial frying. Take the thickest part of the thigh to 165F/74C on an instant-read thermometer and ignore the clock; the frying stage should be a pale colour only, so the bird still has cooking left to do.
- Keep the fire slowButtered breadcrumbs over direct flame burn in a minute or two. Build the fire to one side, sit the chicken over the cooler part, and turn it often as instructed — the frequent turning is doing real work here, not fussing.
- The saucesSauce à la Tartare in this period is a mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, gherkins and herbs, served cold in a separate tureen. The hot accompaniment is a plain brown gravy sharpened with lemon juice; pan juices from the frying stage, loosened with a little stock, will do.
- The cost line"Probable cost, 3s. 6d." is late-Victorian retail shorthand — three shillings and sixpence for the whole dish. It is a price record, not a measurement, and tells you a decent fowl was a considered purchase rather than a weeknight default.
"À la tartare" attached itself in nineteenth-century cookery to things crumbed, grilled and sent to table with a cold, sharp, caper-and-gherkin mayonnaise — the name is generally traced to the French vogue for calling piquant or supposedly rough-and-ready preparations Tartar, rather than to any Central Asian dish. Poulet à la tartare appears in Cassell's, compiled for British households in the 1870s–80s, and the method has its own logic: splitting and flattening exposed more surface to the fire and shortened the cooking, while the butter, crumbs and egg guarded against the dryness of grilled poultry. The instruction to remove the feet is a reminder that birds then came from the poulterer largely intact, and that the cook, not the shop, did the dismembering.