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Fowl, to Dress
Pound together in a mortar two ounces of fat bacon and the same of suet. Mince two ounces of veal and grate the same weight of lean ham. Blend all in a mortar, and beat in the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs and a tea-cupful of bread-crumbs. Flavour with an anchovy, salt and pepper to taste, and mix to a smooth paste with three well-beaten eggs. Stuff a young, boned fowl with this forcemeat, truss it with the legs and wings drawn inward, and put it into a stewpan with a little white chicken or veal broth. When it has stewed one hour, take it out on a hot dish; boil up the gravy, and stir in a piece of butter rolled in flour and a cupful of cream. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and serve. Sufficient for three persons.
A boned bird stuffed with a rich veal-and-bacon forcemeat, gently stewed rather than roasted. The critical point is that the stuffing is a raw meat-and-egg mixture sealed inside the bird, so the timing given needs verifying with a thermometer rather than a clock.
- Check the forcemeat, not the birdAn hour of gentle stewing may cook a small boned fowl through, but the dense raw forcemeat at its centre heats slowly. Take the temperature at the middle of the stuffing and look for 165F/74C before serving; add time in the broth if it falls short.
- "A young fowl", bonedThe recipe specifies only a young bird, with no weight given; a chicken of roughly 3-4 lb suits the stated yield of three. Ask the butcher to bone it, leaving the wing and leg bones in if you want it to hold shape. Boning at home means working the flesh off the carcass from the back with a small sharp knife.
- The mortarThe pounding is to make a smooth, emulsified paste. A food processor does the whole job in a minute or two: bacon and suet first, then veal and ham, then the cooked yolks, crumbs and anchovy, with the beaten eggs added last so the mixture does not slacken and split.
- SuetBeef suet is sold shredded in packets or can be had from a butcher. Cold unsalted butter or extra fatty pork will stand in; the point is fat that keeps the forcemeat moist through a long moist cook.
- A tea-cupfulVictorian teacups are usually reckoned at somewhere around 5-6 fl oz, so roughly three-quarters of a cup of fresh breadcrumbs, lightly packed. The later "cupful of cream" is probably nearer 8 fl oz, but the book does not define either measure; judge by the consistency of the paste and the sauce.
- The anchovyOne salted or oil-packed fillet, mashed to nothing. It reads as depth rather than fish. Salt the forcemeat only after the anchovy and ham are in, since both bring plenty.
- "A little broth"Enough to come a third to halfway up the bird, no more, or the finished gravy will be thin and the flavour leached out. Keep the pan at a bare tremble with the lid on; a rolling boil tears the skin of a boned bird.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre mani\, kneaded together in equal weight, about 1 oz of each here. Whisk it into the boiling gravy in small pieces, let it cook a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste, then add the cream and take it off the heat before the lemon goes in so it does not curdle.
- YieldThree, as stated, though the forcemeat makes it substantial and it will stretch to four with potatoes and a green vegetable. Let the bird rest five minutes, then carve across in thick slices so each one shows a round of stuffing.
Boning a fowl and packing it with forcemeat is one of the oldest tests of a cook's knife work, and it survived into the Victorian kitchen as a way of turning a modest bird into a dish that carved neatly and stretched further. The forcemeat here is entirely characteristic of the period: bacon, suet, veal, ham, hard yolks and crumbs bound with raw egg, with an anchovy doing the savoury work that a stock cube or fish sauce might now. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, generally dated to the last decades of the nineteenth century, gathered thousands of such entries into alphabetical order, and its instructions assume a mortar, a stewpan and a cook who already knows what trussing looks like. The finish -- gravy thickened with butter and flour, enriched with cream and sharpened with lemon -- is the standard English white sauce of the era, with a loose resemblance to the French velout\ that dominated professional kitchens across the Channel.