Fay Tincher
TARA NABE
Into a chafing dish cut the meat of an uncooked chicken in small squares. An equal quantity of celery. Over this pour one pint of seol sauce and a gill of saki: cook until chicken is done and serve in small bowl with rice.
Sincerely yours,
A chafing-dish supper dish from an era when the chafing dish was the actor's stove — small, portable, and usable in a dressing room. The recipe is workable, but one quantity in it needs rethinking before you begin.
- A pint of soy sauce is not a sauce, it is a brineTorinabe is built on dashi or chicken stock seasoned with soy; a full pint of straight soy over one chicken would be close to inedible. Read it as a pint of light stock with a few tablespoons of soy sauce stirred in, or the dish will be pure salt.
- "Seol sauce" and "saki"Almost certainly soy sauce and sake as set down by ear or garbled in typesetting. Use a Japanese-style light soy (usukuchi or a standard koikuchi) and a drinking sake rather than salted cooking sake, since the recipe supplies its own salt.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is a reasonable amount of sake for a whole chicken and needs a few minutes of simmering to lose its raw edge.
- Chafing dish heatA spirit lamp gives a low, steady heat that will barely bring a pint of liquid to a simmer. On a modern burner, keep it at a bare simmer rather than a boil — hard boiling toughens the chicken squares and clouds the broth.
- TimingHalf-inch pieces of boneless chicken cook through in 8 to 12 minutes at a simmer. Add the celery in the last four or five minutes so it keeps some snap; cooked the whole time it goes stringy and gives up its water into the broth.
- Doneness"Cook until chicken is done" means 165F at the thickest piece. With small cubes in simmering liquid this happens well before the meat looks dry, so cut one open rather than cooking by the clock.
- Yield and servingOne chicken, if it ran to 3 or 4 lb, would feed about four. Serve the meat and broth in small bowls with hot rice, as the recipe directs -- the broth is the point, and the rice absorbs the salt.
Tori nabe — chicken hot pot — is a domestic Japanese one-pot dish, cooked at the table in a shallow earthenware or iron pan, and the chafing dish was the nearest American equivalent. Recipes like this reached American cooks through the wave of Japonisme that ran from the 1880s through the 1910s, and through Japanese domestic servants working in California households; the vaudeville and film world Fay Tincher belonged to was based partly in Los Angeles, where soy sauce and sake would have been easier to buy than in most of the country. The mangled transliterations here ("tara nabe" for tori nabe, "seol" for soy, "saki" for sake) are of a kind common in celebrity cookbooks of the period, which were often assembled quickly from handwritten replies — the dish is real, the spelling is whoever held the pen.