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Chicken with Sippets
Take a small chicken trussed for boiling, and let it soak in a pan of cold water for half an hour. Put it into a small stewpan just large enough to hold it; put in half a pint of cold water, and when it boils cover the saucepan closely, and let it simmer very gently for twenty or twenty-five minutes, according to its size. Dish up the chickens in a very hot, covered dish, put half a dozen sippets of bread round the bottom, and then strain the broth from the chicken through a fine lawn sieve into the dish, taking care to prevent any fat passing through. Add a little salt, if approved.
A plainly built dish from the invalid-cookery chapter, where the point is a clear, unseasoned broth and tender meat rather than flavour or browning. Two details carry the whole thing: a pan that fits the bird closely, and a very low simmer.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, either dry-toasted or crisped in a little butter. Half a dozen laid in the bottom of the dish soak up the broth; cut them thick enough that they do not dissolve on contact.
- How much waterHalf a pint is 1 cup by US measure, or 1 1/4 cups if the book is following the British pint. Either way it is meant to come only partway up the bird, which steams as much as it boils, so the little broth that results is strongly flavoured.
- The pan matters"Just large enough to hold it" is not decoration. In a wide pan the liquid spreads, boils away, and the exposed breast dries out. Use the smallest lidded pot the chicken will sit in, and keep the lid on for the whole simmer.
- Size and timingTwenty to twenty-five minutes only works for a genuinely small bird -- a poussin or spring chicken of about 1 to 1 1/2 lb. A modern 3 1/2 to 4 lb supermarket chicken needs upward of an hour by this method.
- Check the temperatureWhatever the size, take the thickest part of the thigh to 165F on an instant-read thermometer before dishing up. Poached poultry gives no visual browning cue, so the thermometer is the only reliable signal.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and clouds the broth with scum and rendered fat. Aim for the barest tremble at the surface.
- Lawn sieve and the fat'Lawn' is a fine plain-weave linen (later cotton) cloth, so a lawn sieve strained through the fabric itself; a fine-mesh strainer with a layer of damp muslin does the same work. Skim the surface fat first, then pour slowly and stop before the last spoonful so nothing greasy follows.
- The half-hour soakCold soaking was generally understood to draw out blood and pale the flesh, though the recipe gives no reason for it. It does nothing useful now, and if you skip it keep the bird refrigerated instead of standing at room temperature.
- YieldNo yield is given; one small chicken will do for a single invalid, or stretch to two people as a light supper. The recipe leaves salt optional -- 'a little salt, if approved' -- so add it sparingly or not at all.
Invalid cookery was a standing chapter in household manuals well into the twentieth century, back when convalescence at home was long and the sickroom diet was the cook's responsibility. Its rules were consistent: nothing fried, nothing highly seasoned, nothing browned, and everything served scalding hot in covered dishes so it reached the bedside still warm. Sippets are older than the genre by centuries -- the word is usually taken to be a diminutive of "sip," or an alteration of "sop," a piece of bread put into liquid, and appears in English cookery long before forks were common. Here they do double duty, adding a little substance to a broth that is otherwise almost nothing, and giving a patient with no appetite something to eat with a spoon. The insistence on straining out every trace of fat reflects the period's belief that fat was hard on a weak digestion, a conviction that shaped sickroom food far more than any notion of flavour.