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Fowl, Braised, with Beef and Chest-Nuts
Take a piece of the upper side of the round of beef, about one pound and a half, and rub it with a pickle made with the following ingredients. Half a tea-spoonful of salt, and the same of pepper, a pinch of cayenne, a salt-spoonful of mustard, the same of grated nutmeg, a piece of garlic about the size of a pea, half a gill of some good sauce, either Worcester or Harvey, a table-spoonful of oil, and the strained juice of a lemon. Let the beef stay in and be basted with this pickle for twenty-four hours. Put a piece of butter in a stewpan, with the heart of a celery-root, a carrot, and two shallots. When drained from the pickle, lay in the beef, and place a fine fat fowl, trussed for boiling, on it; cover the breast with butter, and six good-sized slices of bacon, and add, lastly, three-quarters of a pint of water, and the sauce. Baste the fowl frequently; throw into the gravy one dozen and a half of peeled chestnuts, and be careful not to stew too quickly. When it has simmered about two hours and a half take up the fowl, put the bacon round it, and pour a rich white sauce over it. Dish the beef separately, with the vegetables and gravy. Serve both dishes at once. Probable cost, 8s. 6d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
Two dishes come out of one pan here: a marinated braised beef and a poached-braised fowl that sits on top of it. The timing is written for the beef, which is why the bird needs watching.
- The hinge: the fowl finishes long before the beefA 4-5 lb chicken sitting over the beef will be done in about 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes, not two and a half hours. Take it out when the thigh reads 165F, keep it warm under foil, and let the beef carry on until tender.
- "A fine fat fowl"A 4-5 lb roasting chicken, trussed with the legs and wings tied close so it holds its shape while it steams over the beef.
- Archaic measuresA gill is 5 fl oz in the British measure the book uses, so half a gill of sauce is about 2 1/2 fl oz, roughly 5 tablespoons. A salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Three-quarters of a pint of water is 15 fl oz by the British pint, or about 1 3/4 cups.
- Harvey's sauceA dark anchovy, soy and walnut-ketchup sauce, commercially long gone. Worcestershire, the book's own alternative, is the direct substitute and is what most cooks will reach for.
- The pickle is a marinade"Pickle" here means a wet rub, not a brine cure. Marinate the beef in the refrigerator rather than on a larder shelf, in a covered dish, turning rather than basting since the mixture is small.
- ChestnutsEighteen peeled chestnuts added at the start will collapse over two and a half hours. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are the practical choice and need only the last 30 to 40 minutes in the gravy.
- Heat level"Be careful not to stew too quickly" is the operative instruction. Keep the liquid at a bare tremble on the smallest burner, or move the covered pan to a 300F oven, which holds the temperature more reliably.
- The rich white sauceA velouté: cook a butter-and-flour roux without colour, then whisk in strained cooking liquid from the pan and a little cream. About a cup of finished sauce is enough for the bird.
- YieldSix to seven, as stated, on the assumption both dishes are set on the table together. The 8s. 6d. costing is the book's own period arithmetic, not a modern guide.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a single pan might be expected to yield two separate dishes for the table, and this entry is a neat example of the economy: the beef flavours and moistens the fowl, the fowl's fat and bacon baste the beef, and the pair are sent up at once as if they had been cooked apart. The bottled sauces called for — Worcester and Harvey's — mark the period precisely. Harvey's sauce, a dark anchovy-and-soy relish generally traced to late eighteenth-century London and sold in tall glass bottles through the Victorian decades, was a store-cupboard staple that has since faded from general use, though versions have been produced intermittently, while Worcestershire outlived it. Chestnuts here are doing the work of a winter vegetable rather than a garnish; before the year-round vegetable trade they were among the few starchy sweet things available fresh from autumn onward, and English cookery books of the period are known to pair them with poultry, game and braised beef.