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Fowl, Boiled, with Rice
Into some clear broth put an onion, pepper, salt, and mace; stew the fowl very gently in this for half an hour: then add half a pound of rice, well washed; simmer till this is quite tender, then remove the rice, and place on a hot sieve to drain; dish the fowl, and place rice all round it. Serve with melted butter and parsley for sauce; do not use too much broth. Time, one hour or longer.
A plain Victorian boiled fowl, where the point is that the rice cooks in the poaching broth and takes all its flavour from the bird. Two things decide whether it works: the age of the bird and how little liquid you use.
- Use as little broth as possibleThe instruction "do not use too much broth" is the hinge of the dish. The liquid should barely cover the bird, so that the rice added later cooks in a concentrated stock rather than a thin one. Too much broth and the rice tastes of water.
- A "fowl" is not a supermarket chickenIn Victorian usage a fowl generally meant a mature bird past its laying prime, tough-fleshed and full of flavour, needing an hour or more of gentle simmering; the recipe's "one hour or longer" fits that. A modern 4–5 lb roasting chicken is far younger and will be done in 50–60 minutes at a bare simmer. Cook to 165°F in the thickest part of the thigh.
- Half a pound of riceThat is about 1¼ cups of long-grain rice, which is generous for one bird. It goes in unrinsed at your peril — the washing is what keeps the grains separate in the crowded pot.
- Timings, adjustedHalf an hour for the bird before the rice goes in is sound only for a mature hen. With a young chicken, give it 35–40 minutes first, then add the rice for the last 15–18 minutes so the two finish together.
- MaceBlade mace, the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, was a standard English poultry seasoning and is still sold whole. One blade is enough; ground mace at about ¼ teaspoon substitutes, though it clouds the broth.
- "Melted butter" means a sauceIn Victorian English cookery melted butter is a thickened white sauce — butter, flour and liquid — not simply butter run in a pan. Made here with a little of the poaching broth and stirred with chopped parsley, it is the correct accompaniment.
- Draining the riceLifting the rice out onto a hot sieve keeps it from turning to a porridge in the residual heat and stops it weeping onto the platter. Keep it warm and dish it quickly; it stiffens as it cools.
- ServingOne bird, rice banked around it, serves four generously. The remaining broth is worth keeping for soup the next day.
Boiled fowl was the standard English treatment for a bird past its laying prime — long, gentle simmering being the only thing that makes an old hen tender — and it appears throughout nineteenth-century household manuals as an economical dinner. The rice-round-the-fowl presentation, with a plain butter-and-parsley sauce, belongs to a distinctly British school of cookery in which rice was a starch to be boiled dry and served as a border rather than a dish in itself. The lesson it demonstrates is a general one rather than a regional specialty: that a single pot of well-managed broth can cook two components at once, each improving the other, provided the cook resists the urge to drown them. That final warning — "do not use too much broth" — is the sort of practical note that separates working kitchen writing from the more ornamental cookery books of the same decades.