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Fowl, Broiled, with Mushroom Sauce
Divide a large fowl into quarters, broil as in last recipe, basting plentifully with butter. Pepper lightly, and season to taste with salt. Make a sauce as follows. Stew two dozen button-mushrooms and a slice of lean ham with a little butter; add some brown gravy, about three-quarters of a pint, pepper, and salt, and simmer till the mushrooms are tender. Thicken to the consistency of cream, and add a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, and half that quantity of sugar. Serve with the sauce round the fowls. Time to broil the quarters of fowl, about thirty-five minutes. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A late-Victorian grill with a mushroom-and-ham gravy. The recipe assumes you have read the preceding entry and that brown gravy is already standing in the kitchen; both need filling in.
- The hinge: cook the fowl by heat, not by clockThirty-five minutes is a figure for quarters on a grid set well back from a clear fire. Work to an internal temperature of 74C/165F at the thickest part of the thigh and breast, and expect the time to vary considerably with your grill and the size of the quarters.
- "A large fowl""Fowl" here simply means a chicken. Use a 4-5 lb bird, jointed into two leg-and-thigh pieces and two breast-and-wing pieces.
- "Broil" means grillIn British usage of this book, broiling is cooking on a gridiron over the fire. Use an overhead grill or a barbecue at moderate heat, well away from the element, turning and basting often. High direct heat will blacken the skin long before the thighs are done.
- Brown gravyThree-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz, about 1¾ cups. The recipe assumes a meat-based gravy already standing in the kitchen rather than anything from a packet; a well-reduced dark chicken or veal stock is the closest ordinary substitute.
- Button mushroomsTwo dozen small whole buttons, roughly 8-10 oz. Stew them in butter with the ham until they give up their liquid, then add the gravy, so the sauce carries mushroom flavour rather than just mushroom pieces.
- "Thicken to the consistency of cream"Either reduce the sauce down or stir in a little beurre manié (equal butter and flour kneaded together) at the end. Pourable cream, not double cream, is the target.
- Lemon and sugarA teaspoon of lemon juice and half a teaspoon of sugar sound negligible but they are the point of the sauce, lifting a heavy brown gravy. Add them off the heat and taste before serving.
- YieldFour to five, as stated, if the quarters are from a genuinely large bird and there is a vegetable and potatoes alongside.
Cassell's ran on cross-reference: "broil as in last recipe" is typical of a dictionary-format cookery book, where entries were arranged alphabetically. The mushroom-and-ham sauce belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that dominated respectable English cooking from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a brown gravy base built up with a scrap of ham for savour and finished with an acid and a pinch of sugar in the way Victorian sauce-making generally favoured. The costing in shillings and pence, given as a matter of course, suggests a book written for a mistress of the house who might well have planned her table against a weekly budget and expected to be told what a dish would set her back.