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Fowl, to Stew
Truss a fowl as for boiling, and put it into a stewpan containing a quart of good gravy; add a head of celery cut into pieces an inch in length, pepper, salt, and one small blade of mace. The fowl should be protected from the bottom of the stewpan; use four bright skewers for this purpose; rest the fowl upon them, and stew till the gravy is reduced to less than half its original quantity. Put the fowl on a hot dish, thicken the sauce with two ounces of butter rolled in flour; season to taste, and add a glass of ketchup. Serve hot with the sauce poured over. Time, one hour and a half to stew. Sufficient for a dish.
A braise rather than a stew: the bird sits above the liquid on skewers and cooks in the steam of a reducing gravy. Two things decide whether it works — the skewer trivet and the kind of bird you buy.
- "Fowl" is not a supermarket chickenIn a recipe like this, "fowl" generally means an older, tougher bird — typically a hen past laying — with dense meat and plenty of collagen, which is why the book allows an hour and a half. A 4–5 lb roasting chicken will be done in about an hour at a bare simmer, and the breast will be dry and stringy if you hold it to the full time. If you can find a genuine boiling fowl or stewing hen, the original timing is about right.
- The skewersFour metal skewers laid crosswise in the pan keep the bird off the hot base so it steams instead of scorching. A folding trivet, a small wire rack or a bed of thick vegetable pieces does the same job with less rattling.
- A quart of gravyFour cups of good gravy or stock, or nearer five if you take the imperial quart the book would have meant. It should not cover the bird; the recipe wants it reduced to less than half, so under about two and a half cups from an imperial quart.
- A head of celeryThe whole bunch, not one rib — trimmed, and the outer stalks are fine here since they will cook down entirely.
- Blade of maceThe dried outer casing of nutmeg, sold in whole blades at spice merchants. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, added late so it does not turn dusty.
- Ketchup means mushroom or walnut ketchupIn a nineteenth-century British kitchen, unqualified "ketchup" is the thin, dark, salty mushroom or walnut sauce, closer to Worcestershire than to anything tomato. A glass here is roughly a wineglass, about 2 fl oz. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet and pink, which is not the intention.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manié: work the 2 oz butter with about the same volume of flour into a paste, then whisk it into the simmering liquid in small pieces. It needs a couple of minutes of boiling afterwards to lose the raw flour taste.
- Heat and yieldKeep the liquid at a lazy simmer throughout — a hard boil toughens the breast and clouds the sauce. "Sufficient for a dish" is the book's own phrase and means the one bird makes a single dish, served hot with the sauce poured over.
This is one of the plain, thrifty methods for dealing with an old bird rather than a young one: a hen past laying was too tough to roast, so it went into the pot with stock and aromatics for long, slow cooking. The skewer trick is characteristic of nineteenth-century range cookery, where a coal-fired hob gave fierce, uneven bottom heat and a cook needed some way to lift food clear of it — the same reasoning that produced the trivet inside a stewpan. The final glass of ketchup dates the recipe as clearly as anything: mushroom and walnut ketchups were pantry staples in Britain through the 1800s, used much as a modern cook uses soy sauce or Worcestershire, to give depth and salt to a pale sauce. Tomato ketchup only crowded them out of the word later.