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Boiled Fowl
Clean a 4 pound fowl and cook slowly for 1 1/4 hours, or until tender, in 1 quart boiling water with 6 slices carrot 2 stalks celery 2 slices onion Sprig of parsley 2 teaspoons salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. Cool in the stock. Fowl cooked in pressure cooker under 20 pounds pressure will become tender in from 30 to 40 minutes. Fowl, if nearly covered with boiling water and boiled 5 minutes, will become tender if cooked in fireless cooker for 5 or 6 hours.
A plain poached bird, meant less as a dinner in itself than as the raw material for salads, sandwiches and creamed dishes. Two of the three methods given belong to equipment that has left the kitchen.
- What a "fowl" isNot a broiler. A fowl was a mature laying hen past her productive years, with tough, well-flavoured flesh and plenty of collagen. A supermarket roasting chicken of the same weight will be tender in 45 to 60 minutes; if you find a true stewing hen, expect the full 1 1/4 hours and often longer.
- Keep it below a boilThis is the hinge. "Cook slowly" means bare shivering movement at the surface, around 180F. A rolling boil tightens the breast into strings and clouds the stock, and no amount of extra time repairs it.
- The water will not cover the birdOne quart does not submerge a 4 lb fowl in an ordinary wide pot. Use the narrowest pot the bird fits in, keep the lid on, and turn it once at the halfway mark. The intent is a concentrated stock, not a generous broth.
- Twenty pounds pressureDomestic pressure cookers today are capped at 15 psi, and electric models run nearer 10 to 12. The 30 to 40 minutes quoted assumes more pressure than your pot can reach, so allow 45 minutes at 15 psi for a stewing hen and check for tenderness rather than trusting the clock.
- Skip the fireless cookerA fireless cooker was an insulated box that held preheated food with no further heat source. Five minutes of boiling followed by five or six unheated hours takes poultry slowly down through the range where bacteria multiply fastest. Use the stovetop or the pressure cooker instead; a slow cooker is not a substitute, as it supplies continuous heat and follows different timings.
- Cooling in the stockSound advice for moisture, since the meat reabsorbs liquid as it cools. Do it in the refrigerator, or set the pot in a sink of ice water first: a full pot left on the counter can stay warm for hours.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoons of salt to a quart is roughly 1.2 percent, which is in the right range for a poaching liquid you intend to keep as stock. If you plan to reduce that stock afterwards, hold some back.
- YieldA 4 lb bird gives roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of picked meat, enough for six sandwiches or a chicken salad for four to six, plus a quart or so of strained stock.
Boiled fowl is a working recipe rather than a showpiece, and its uses are entirely practical: cold poached hen is the starting point for chicken salad, creamed chicken on toast, croquettes, patty shells and sandwich fillings, all staples of the light midday or evening meal that could be assembled in advance. The three methods offered date the page more precisely than anything else on it. The fireless cooker, an insulated chest packed around preheated food or soapstone discs, was widely promoted in the first decades of the twentieth century as a fuel-saving device, and the domestic pressure cooker was then the newer arrival, quoted here at a pressure higher than modern domestic cookers reach. The word "fowl" itself marks a food economy in which hens were kept for eggs and eaten only when they stopped laying, which is why so many older cookbooks reach for long, wet cooking where we would reach for a roasting pan.