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Baked Chicken
Clean and wash the chicken and cover with thin slices of cold boiled ham. Bind the ham on with fine cotton cord, then lay upon the grating of your covered roaster; pour a cupful of hot stock over it, scatter parsley and onion juice over it; cover tightly, then cook slowly, allowing twenty-five minutes to the pound. Baste three times, and when it seems tender by testing with a fork, unwrap, and wash with butter; then dredge with flour and let it stand in the oven until brown.
Thicken the gravy with browned flour, season, and let it come to a boil.
This is a covered-roaster braise rather than a dry roast: the bird steams in stock under a lid, wrapped in ham, and only meets direct oven heat at the end for colour. The two things worth getting right are the oven temperature, which the original never states, and knowing when to stop.
- Oven temperatureThe original never states one. A moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, suits slow cooking in a covered roaster; for the final browning, once the ham comes off and the bird is buttered and floured, a hot oven of around 425F for 10-15 minutes with the lid off will do it.
- Timing and donenessTwenty-five minutes to the pound is generous by modern standards and will overshoot on a supermarket bird. Use a thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the breast, 175F at the thigh joint, and start checking a 4 lb chicken at about 75 minutes.
- The covered roasterA period covered roaster was a deep oval pan with a domed lid and a raised grating that kept the bird out of the liquid. A Dutch oven with a trivet or a small rack in a lidded roasting pan does the same job; the point is that the chicken steams above the stock, not in it.
- Barding with hamThe ham slices keep the breast moist and season it; they come off before the bird is buttered, floured and browned, and the recipe does not say what becomes of them. Use thin slices of cooked ham, cut thin enough to lie flat against the skin.
- Cotton cordFine cotton cord means plain kitchen twine. Avoid anything synthetic or dyed, and tie loosely enough to slip a finger under so the ham can be pulled away cleanly later.
- Onion juiceOnion juice is called for often in books of this period, made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve. Half a grated onion, squeezed, gives about a tablespoon and is all this needs.
- "Wash with butter"This is simply brushing melted butter over the bare skin. The flour dredge that follows should be a light dusting from a sieve; a heavy coat turns pasty rather than crisp.
- Browned flour gravyBrowned flour is flour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, which gives colour without a roux's thickening power, so it takes rather more than you expect. Two tablespoons to a cup of the strained pan liquid, whisked in and boiled for a minute or two, is about right.
- YieldA 4-5 lb chicken serves four, with roughly a cup of gravy.