Home › The Principles of Cookery › Onion Stuffing for Chicken
Onion Stuffing for Chicken
Beat the yolk of an egg thoroughly, and mix with it a table-spoonful of hot vinegar, half a salt-spoonful of powdered thyme, and as much finely-minced parsley as will make it quite thick. Boil a large Spanish onion in three or four waters until it is tender, press it well, mince it finely, and mix it with the vinegar, etc. Add two ounces of boiled pickled pork cut up into small pieces, and a little pepper and salt. A chicken which has been filled with this stuffing should be braised and served with white sauce. Time, one hour to boil the onion. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for one chicken.
A wet, sharp onion forcemeat with no breadcrumbs in it — the parsley and minced onion do all the binding. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: keep the yolk from scramblingA tablespoon of hot vinegar poured into a beaten yolk will curdle it if it goes in all at once. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, or let the vinegar cool to warm first.
- Salt-spoonfulA Victorian salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon of dried thyme. The parsley quantity is left to judgement: expect a good handful, finely chopped, to bring the mixture to a paste.
- Three or four watersDraining and refreshing the pan repeatedly strips the onion of its harshness and sulphur. A full hour is more than a Spanish onion needs today — 30 to 40 minutes at a simmer, with two changes of water, will leave it tender without turning it to pulp. Press out the liquid hard or the stuffing will be sodden.
- Pickled porkSalt pork or unsmoked belly cured in brine; the recipe wants it already boiled, so simmer it first. Substitute unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta, simmered until tender and diced; two ounces is about 55 g.
- Braised, not roastedBraising here means the bird sits on a bed of vegetables in a covered pot with a little stock and cooks gently — the moist heat suits a stuffing that has no bread to absorb fat. The recipe gives no temperature; a low oven or a bare simmer on the hob both answer.
- Stuffing inside the birdPack it loosely and cook until the centre of the stuffing, not just the thigh, reaches 165F. A dense wet forcemeat lags well behind the meat around it.
- Yield and costEnough for one chicken; the original gives no weight for the bird, only 'sufficient for one chicken'. Fourpence was the estimated ingredient cost at the time of publication and is of no use except as a reminder that this was a thrifty stuffing.
Cassell's belongs to the run of Victorian household dictionaries that tried to put a costed, portion-counted answer beside every dish, which is why an onion stuffing comes with a price in pence and the note "sufficient for one chicken." English stuffings of the period divided roughly into bread-and-suet forcemeats and a sharper onion sort, of a kind long associated in the sage-and-onion form with goose, duck and pork; this version has no sage and no crumbs, using thyme, parsley and vinegar instead, giving an acidity that would cut the richness of a braised bird. Boiling onions through several changes of water turns up regularly in English recipes where the onion was to be eaten in quantity, the strong flavour being thought coarse. The pickled pork suggests the ordinary provisioning of the period household, where a crock of brined pork was a common standby.