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Fowl, Hashed
Cut up a roast fowl, or any part of one. Put the bones and trimmings into a stewpan, with water to cover them; add a carrot or two, some sliced onion, previously fried in butter, a blade of pounded mace, some savoury herbs, pepper, and salt. When the goodness is extracted, strain and thicken with a small quantity of flour and butter. Put the fowl into a clean stewpan, pour the gravy over, and simmer for twenty minutes. A few minutes before serving add the juice of half a lemon. Garnish with sippets of toasted bread. Time to stew bones, etc., for gravy, one hour and a half; to warm fowl, twenty minutes. Probable coast, exclusive of the poultry, 6d.
A Victorian use-up dish for the remains of a roast fowl: the carcass makes a quick stock, the stock becomes the sauce, and the picked meat is only warmed through. The whole point is that the meat is already cooked.
- The hinge: warm, do not cookTwenty minutes at a bare simmer is the outer limit for already-roasted meat, and only if the pieces are large and on the bone. Boneless breast turns stringy in half that time; add it in the last five minutes and keep the liquid below a visible boil.
- A blade of maceOne blade is a single dried strip of nutmeg aril; blades vary in size, but one is roughly in the region of a quarter-teaspoon of ground mace. "Pounded" means crushed in a mortar; if using ground mace, add it to the stock rather than the finished sauce so it loses its raw edge.
- "When the goodness is extracted"The stated time is an hour and a half for the bones, which is right for a stock you want with body. The recipe specifies only water to cover, so the yield depends on the pan: from one carcass expect somewhere under a pint of usable liquid after straining.
- Thickening"A small quantity of flour and butter" means a beurre manié: butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked into the strained hot stock. No quantities are given; the wording points to just enough to lightly nap the gravy. Cassell's expects a pouring gravy, not a thick sauce.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter and arranged round the edge of the dish. They are structural as much as decorative: they take up the thin gravy.
- Lemon at the endThe acid is added late deliberately. Held in a hot sauce it dulls, and in a flour-thickened gravy a long simmer with acid can slacken the thickening. The recipe's measure is the juice of half a lemon for the whole dish.
- Yield and servingOne roast chicken carcass with its scraps feeds two, three if the sippets are generous and there is rice or mashed potato under it. Scale up by making the stock from two carcasses rather than by adding water.
- That 6dThe cost is quoted "exclusive of the poultry" because the poultry is assumed to be already paid for and already eaten once. Sixpence covers the carrot, onion, butter, flour, lemon and bread.
Hashed fowl belongs to the large Victorian category of "rechauff" dishes — second appearances of a joint, worked hard because a roast fowl was an expensive item in a middle-class household and nothing of it was let go. The entry demonstrates a method: extract a small stock from bones and trimmings, thicken it lightly, and use it to carry cold meat back to the table without cooking the meat a second time. The vocabulary is that of the period's professional kitchen filtered down for domestic use — a stewpan rather than a saucepan, mace bought in blades rather than ground, sippets as a standard garnish inherited from much older English cookery, where the word had meant a piece of bread for dipping since at least the seventeenth century. The itemised "probable cost" was a selling point of the Victorian household books, aimed at readers keeping accounts and at the cook expected to justify them.