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Fricasseed Chicken
Clean and wash the chicken, break every joint apart and divide the breast and back in 2 pieces each. Place the pieces in a pot; add a little water, some minced onion, parsley, and chopped fat pork. Cover closely, and place over a slow fire until tender. Lift the meat out with a split spoon, placing the white meat at one end of the platter and the dark at the other end. Place the platter in an open oven or over hot water while you make the gravy. To do this, pour the gravy into a bowl and set in iced water until the fat rises. Skim, return to the pot, and add a cupful of hot milk which has been thickened with a tablespoonful of butter rubbed into 1 of flour. Add a pinch of soda, and let it boil for one minute. Now pour the gravy into a dish containing 2 well-beaten eggs, and when thoroughly blended pour over the chicken.
A classic white fricassee: the bird is stewed gently in its own juices with pork fat, then the strained liquor is turned into an egg-thickened sauce. The whole dish hinges on how you finish that sauce.
- Do not scramble the eggsPouring hot gravy onto the beaten eggs, rather than eggs into the pot, is the original's way of tempering. Add the hot liquid in a thin stream while whisking hard, and do not return the finished sauce to direct heat or it will curdle into shreds.
- The chickenA 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird cut into eight or ten pieces. A stewing hen will need closer to two hours, a supermarket chicken 45 to 60 minutes at a bare simmer.
- "A little water"Enough to come a third of the way up the meat, roughly a cup for a whole cut-up bird. This is a braise, not a boil; the closed pot does most of the work.
- Chopped fat porkSalt pork or unsmoked fatback, about 2 oz, diced small. Blanch it briefly if it is heavily salted, since the gravy reduces and concentrates.
- "Slow fire"The lowest steady simmer, with the surface barely trembling. On a modern burner that is the smallest ring on its lowest setting.
- Degreasing shortcutThe bowl-in-iced-water trick is a fast way to bring fat to the surface. A fat separator or a few minutes' settling and skimming does the same job.
- The pinch of sodaAdded to keep the milk from curdling in a slightly acidic, salty gravy. With fresh milk and gentle heat it is unnecessary, and too much will give a soapy taste.
- "Split spoon" and "open oven"A slotted spoon, and the oven left ajar with only residual heat -- a warming spot, not a cooking one. A 175F oven or a platter set over a pan of hot water works.
- YieldFour servings. Serve with rice, boiled potatoes or biscuits to take the sauce.
Fricassee names a middle way between roasting and boiling: meat cut up, cooked in a small amount of liquid, and served in a sauce made from that liquid. The white version, finished with egg and cream or milk, reached English cookery by way of France -- the word is in English use well before the eighteenth century -- and became one of the standard American treatments for chicken; nineteenth-century household books commonly distinguished "brown" fricassee, in which the pieces are floured and seared first, from "white," as here.