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Rice, Fowl Stewed In
Take a fowl, half boil it in a moderate quantity of water, then put to it a quarter of a pound of rice with some mace. Stew the fowl till it becomes tender. Some well-seasoned veal broth added during the stewing will make the dish more savoury. Take care to stew the fowl till it becomes tender; it must not, however, be too much stewed, or it will fall to pieces and lose its form.
A plain Victorian one-pot fowl: the rice cooks in the poaching liquid and thickens it into a loose, mace-scented pilaf around the bird. Almost everything depends on keeping the water low and the heat lower.
- The hinge: barely a simmerThe recipe twice tells you to stew the fowl till tender and then warns against stewing it too much, and it is right. Held at a bare tremble around 180-190F the bird stays intact; at a rolling boil the legs pull away and the breast shreds.
- "A fowl" means a boiling henIn period usage a fowl generally meant an older laying bird, tough and full of flavour, needing an hour or more; the recipe itself does not specify. A modern 3-4 lb roasting chicken is far younger: half-boil it 20 minutes, add the rice, and give it 25-30 minutes more, until a thigh reads 165F.
- A moderate quantity of waterTake this as just enough to come two-thirds up the bird, roughly 2-3 pints in a snug pot. Too much and the quarter-pound of rice will not thicken it; the dish should finish as a bird in wet rice, not soup.
- A quarter of a pound of riceAbout 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons dry, or 115 g. Long-grain keeps its shape; the period cook would likely have used Carolina or Patna rice. Pudding rice will collapse into porridge.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sharp than the seed. One or two blades, fished out before serving, or a scant quarter-teaspoon ground.
- The veal brothOptional here but it is what makes the dish. A light unsalted chicken or veal stock replacing some of the water gives body; salt at the end, once the rice has absorbed the liquid and concentrated it.
- Stir, but rarelyRice sitting under a heavy bird will catch. Use a heavy pot, slide a spoon along the bottom every ten minutes or so, and do not agitate the fowl itself.
- YieldA 3-4 lb bird with this quantity of rice serves four. Carve at the table or lift the fowl out, joint it, and return the pieces to the rice.
Stewed fowl with rice belongs to a long line of English boiled-fowl dishes, one often said to stretch across several centuries, when an old laying hen was too tough to roast and too valuable to waste. Rice arrived in these recipes partly as a thickener and, it is often suggested, partly under the influence of Anglo-Indian cookery, and mace, commonly associated with English white meat and white sauces, marks the dish as belonging to the older tradition rather than the curried one. The lesson of the dish is control of heat, the difference between a fowl that holds its form and one that falls apart. That distinction mattered more when the bird was carried whole to the table and carved in front of the household.