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Fowl, Boiled
Truss the fowl firmly, and boil slowly in a saucepan of hot water. The slower it boils and the better it is skimmed the plumper and whiter it will be. Place the fowl on a hot dish, and pour over it some bchamel; serve parsley and butter, or other sauce, in a tureen. Boiled tongue, ham, or bacon should accompany it. Time: large fowl, one hour; moderate-sized one, three-quarters. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plainly written poaching method that assumes a boiling fowl, a cook standing over the pot with a skimmer, and a second salted meat waiting on the sideboard. The technique still works; the bird and the timings need adjusting.
- Never let it boilThe instruction hidden inside "boil slowly" is that the water should barely move — around 175-180F, with an occasional lazy bubble. A rolling boil shreds the breast, clouds the liquid and tightens the skin; a bare shiver keeps the flesh white and plump, which is the whole point of the dish.
- What "fowl" meantIn this period a boiling fowl was usually a mature hen past laying, tougher and far more flavourful than a supermarket bird. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken stands in perfectly well but will be done sooner; a genuine stewing hen from a butcher may need two hours or more.
- Timing and temperatureThe stated hour for a large fowl is about right for a 5 lb bird started in hot water, but judge by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone. Carry-over will finish it while you make the sauce.
- SkimmingSkim during the first ten minutes, when the greyish protein scum rises fastest. This is not fussiness — unskimmed scum settles back onto the skin and speckles it, and the book is explicit that skimming is what keeps the bird white.
- Cook it in stock, not waterNothing is lost by poaching in light chicken stock with an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. Poaching liquor was often kept for soup in period kitchens, and it makes a better base for the sauce than milk alone.
- Parsley and butterThis is not parsley stirred into melted butter. In nineteenth-century usage it means a thin white or melted-butter sauce — butter, flour and water or stock — finished with a generous handful of chopped blanched parsley. The béchamel poured over the bird is the richer milk-based version of the same idea.
- The tongue, ham or baconThe accompaniment is doing real work: a poached fowl is mild to the point of blandness, and the salted meat supplies the seasoning the bird lacks. If you skip it, salt the poaching liquid properly and season the sauce hard.
- Trussing"Firmly" matters here. A loosely trussed bird sprawls in the pot and the shape suffers on the dish. Legs tied close to the body, wings tucked under.
- Cost and yieldThree shillings and sixpence was a substantial sum for a household dinner in the late Victorian period. Three or four servings is accurate for a bird of this size once the accompanying salt meat is counted in.
Boiled fowl was a fixture of the English dinner table for most of the nineteenth century, and it survived less because it was delicious than because it was useful. A laying hen that had stopped laying was too tough to roast, and long gentle poaching was the one method that made her tender; the by-product, a potful of good broth, went straight into the next day's soup. The pairing with tongue, ham or bacon is equally practical — the salt meat was already in the house, cured and hanging, and it corrected the fowl's mildness. The dish faded with the arrival of cheap young broiler chickens, which roast well and need no rescuing.