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Fowl, to Bone, Without Opening It
After the fowl has been drawn and singed, wipe it inside and out with a clean cloth, but do not wash it. Take off the head, cut through the skin all round the first joint of the legs, and pull them from the fowl, to draw out the large tendons. Raise the flesh first from the lower part of the backbone, and a little also from the end of the breastbone, if necessary; work the knife gradually to the socket of the thigh; with the point of the knife detach the joint from it. Take the end of the bone firmly in the fingers, and cut the flesh clean from it down to the next joint, round which pass the point of the knife carefully, and when the skin is loosened from it in every part, cut round the next bone, keeping the edge of the knife close to it, until the whole of the leg is done. Remove the bones of the other leg in the same manner; then detach the flesh from the back and breastbone sufficiently to enable you to reach to enable you to reach the upper joints of the wings; proceed with these as with the legs, but be especially careful not to pierce the skin of the second joint. It is usual to leave the pinions unbound, in order to give more easily its natural form to the fowl when it is dressed. The merry-thought and neckbones may now be cut away with facility, the back and side-bones taken out without being divided, and the breastbone separated from the flesh, which, as the work progresses, must be turned back from the bones upon the fowl, until it is completely inside out. After the one remaining bone is removed, draw the wings and legs back to their proper form, and turn the fowl right side outwards. Bone a turkey in the same manner, but as it requires a large amount of forcemeat to fill it entirely, the legs and wings are sometimes drawn into the body, to diminish the expense of this. If very securely trussed and sewn, the bird may be either boiled or stewed in rich gravy, as well as roasted, after being boned and forced; but it must be gently cooked, or it may burst.
This is a technique rather than a dish: the whole skeleton comes out through the neck and back while the skin stays intact, leaving a bag of meat to be stuffed and re-formed. A few of the assumptions behind it have changed.
- The hinge: keep the knife against the boneEvery cut should scrape bone, not flesh, and certainly not skin. The recipe singles out the skin of the second wing joint; a pierced skin anywhere will tend to split under the pressure of forcemeat and cooking, and the closing line's warning that the bird "may burst" if not gently cooked points the same way.
- "Drawn and singed"Drawn means gutted; singed means burning off the residual hairs and pinfeathers over a flame. A supermarket bird is already drawn, and a quick pass over a gas burner or a blowtorch does the singeing.
- Do not wash itThe instruction to wipe rather than wash happens to match current food-safety advice, though the recipe gives no reason of its own. Rinsing poultry aerosolises campylobacter around the sink; a dry cloth or paper towel is right.
- VocabularyThe merry-thought is the wishbone. Pinions are the wing tips, left in place to help the bird hold a natural shape. Forcemeat is seasoned ground stuffing, usually veal, pork or the bird's own dark meat bound with breadcrumbs and egg.
- TendonsCutting round the first leg joint and pulling the foot away draws out the large leg tendons. On a young supermarket chicken the tendons are softer and less developed than on the mature birds this book assumes, but they still toughen a boned leg if left.
- Work cold, and use the right knifeA short, stiff boning knife and a bird straight from the refrigerator make this far easier; warm poultry skin tears. Chill the boned bird again before stuffing so it holds its shape while you sew.
- Cooking a stuffed boned birdBecause the forcemeat is enclosed in raw poultry, the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F/74C, checked with a probe, not the flesh alone. The book's insistence on gentle cooking is sound: a roll at 325F/165C rather than a fierce oven cooks through without bursting the seams.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a boned and stuffed chicken of 4-5 lb will carve into neat slices for six to eight, a boned turkey for a dozen or more, and either slices more cleanly cold than hot.
Boning a bird without opening it belongs to the tradition of the galantine, a French preparation well predating the Victorian period — a fowl reconstituted around forcemeat, poached, then served cold and sliced to reveal a mosaic of meat and stuffing; the roasted, hot version is the ballotine. The skill was a mark of a trained cook, and the wording here has been said to echo Eliza Acton's account in Modern Cookery, though no such debt can be established from the page itself; Victorian cookery dictionaries were assembled as much as written. The economic aside about turkeys is the honest part: filling a whole boned turkey takes an alarming quantity of forcemeat, so the legs and wings were tucked inside to shrink the cavity and the bill. The technique never quite died — it survives in the French ballotine, in Italian galantina, and in the multi-bird roasts that reappear at Christmas.