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Chicken Broth (Put the body and legs)
Put the body and legs of the fowl that chicken-panada was made of, after taking off the skin and rump, into the water it was boiled in with 1 blade of mace, 1 slice of onion, and 10 peppercorns. Simmer till the broth be of a pleasant flavor. If there is not water enough, add a little. Beat a quarter of an ounce of sweet almonds, with a teaspoonful of water, fine; boil it in the broth, strain, and when cold remove the fat.
A thrift recipe: it begins with the carcass left over from chicken panada, so it assumes you have already made that dish and still have its cooking water. Read it as a second extraction from one bird.
- Start from the panada potChicken panada was made by boiling a fowl and pounding the breast meat to a paste. What is left — body, legs, and the cooking liquid — is the raw material here. If you are not making panada, simmer a whole chicken, take the breast for something else, and use the frame and its broth.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single piece of the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed; blades vary in size, and it is usually reckoned as somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon of ground mace. Ground mace tends to cloud the broth, so add it near the end and strain carefully.
- Sweet almonds only"Sweet almonds" is the ordinary edible almond, named to distinguish it from bitter almond, which was sold separately in this period and used only in very small quantities as a flavouring because of the prussic acid it yields. A quarter of an ounce is about 7 g, some six or eight nuts.
- Beat fineThe almonds are pounded to a smooth paste with a teaspoon of water in a mortar, which keeps them from oiling. A small food processor or a spice grinder does the same work; the point is a paste fine enough to give the broth body without grit.
- Simmer, do not boilSimmer gently -- The recipe sets no time: simmer at a bare tremble until the broth tastes as you want it. Hard boiling works fat back into the liquid and clouds a broth meant to be clear.
- Season at the endNo salt is specified. Taste and salt lightly after straining, when the broth has reduced to its final strength.
- Chilling is the defatting step"When cold remove the fat" means letting it stand until cool enough for the fat to set into a firm cap you can lift off whole; a fridge does this fastest and overnight is easiest.
Invalid cookery filled its own chapter in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books, when nursing the sick happened at home and light, easily swallowed food was considered a form of treatment. Chicken panada — breast meat pounded smooth with a little of its own liquid — was the standard offering for someone who could not chew, and this broth is its companion, extracting the last nourishment from the bones so nothing of an expensive bird was wasted. The pounded almonds are the older touch: medieval and early modern European cookery used ground almonds constantly to thicken and enrich liquids, a habit that survived longest in exactly this sort of restorative dish. Mace, onion, and a counted number of peppercorns are the whole of the seasoning, deliberately mild on the theory, generally traced to Galenic ideas about digestion that lingered in domestic manuals long after medicine had moved on, that strong flavors taxed a weak stomach.