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Fowl. Broiled
This is a hasty and very excellent dish, suitable for the supper-table, to be had in perfection at Windsor, Cookham, etc. Take off the head of a young fowl, draw and plunge the bird into boiling water. Remove the skin and feathers together. Split it up the back, and lay the inside downwards on a gridiron over a clear fire. Baste frequently, and pepper lightly on all sides. When sufficiently done, put it on a hot dish, sprinkle salt, and rub with butter. Serve with mushroom, tomato, or liver and lemon sauce. The fowl should be turned over when half cooked. Time to broil, thirty-five minutes.
A Victorian spatchcock, cooked over coals rather than in an oven. Everything difficult about it belongs to the first two sentences, which describe killing and scalding a bird you will now buy ready-dressed.
- Start from a spatchcocked chicken"Draw" means remove the entrails; plunging into boiling water loosens the feathers so skin and plumage come away together. Buy a small chicken of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb, split along the backbone and flattened, and skip all of it. If you keep the skin on rather than scalding it off, the bird stays far juicier.
- Split up the back, cut side downLaying the opened bird bone-side to the fire first is the hinge of the method: the ribs and backbone shield the breast while the thickest parts of the thigh get the direct heat. Turning at the halfway mark, as the recipe says at the end, finishes the skin side.
- The gridironAn iron grid of parallel bars standing over the coals. A charcoal grill over medium heat is the closest equivalent; a gas grill or a stovetop grill pan works, and an oven broiler will do if the rack sits 6 to 8 inches from the element.
- "A clear fire"Flames burned down to steady embers, bright and without smoke or flare-up. Basting over live flame drips fat that can ignite, so the instruction to baste frequently suits coals better than a blaze.
- Thirty-five minutesAbout right for a genuinely small bird pressed flat and turned once, but modern supermarket chickens run larger and will need longer. Judge by temperature: 165F/74C in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone.
- Salt at the end, pepper duringThe recipe peppers while the bird cooks and adds salt and butter only once it is on the hot dish. The text gives no reason for the order.
- Liver and lemon sauceThe recipe does not give a formula; period liver sauces are typically the bird's own liver, poached and chopped into melted butter with lemon juice and parsley. Supermarket chickens rarely come with giblets, so buy a couple of ounces of chicken livers separately or use one of the other two sauces named.
- YieldA young fowl of this size serves two as a supper dish, one if it is the only thing on the table.
Cassell's names Windsor and Cookham because these were Thames-side resorts serving rowing parties and day-trippers up from London; broiled fowl was the kind of quick supper such riverside inns and hotels could turn out, though the entry itself says only that the dish is "to be had in perfection" there. The appeal was speed: a bird split and flattened cooks in a fraction of the time a whole roast needs, which is why the entry opens by calling it "hasty." The technique itself is much older than the railway excursion — splitting a small bird down the back for the gridiron is recorded in English cookery long before this book, and the word spatchcock, generally traced to an Irish phrase along the lines of "dispatch cock," carries the same sense of a bird killed and grilled in short order. What dates the recipe most precisely is not the cooking but the assumption in the second sentence: the reader is expected to have an undressed fowl to hand and to know what to do with it.