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Chicken Fricassee
1 year old chicken 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1/2 teaspoon celery salt 2 tablespoons Gold Medal Flour 1 cup cream 1 egg 1/4 teaspoon pepper Dress, wash and cut up the chicken as directed. Wipe each piece, sprinkle with salt and pepper, roll in Gold Medal flour, brown in butter; cover with boiling water and simmer for forty minutes. Remove the meat, reduce the stock to 1 pint, to be used for sauce.
For the sauce melt butter, add flour and seasonings, cook together; add the broth and lemon juice, a little at a time, and cook until smooth. Add the scalded cream, pour this slowly over the egg well beaten, stir well. Arrange the pieces of chicken on a hot platter in something like the order in which they grow. Garnish with toast points and pour the hot sauce over all.
A straightforward braise finished with a cream-and-egg liaison. The only real technique is that last step, which will curdle if rushed.
- The hinge: tempering the eggThe hot sauce goes into the beaten egg, not the reverse, and slowly. Once combined, return it to low heat only long enough to thicken; if it reaches a simmer the egg scrambles and the sauce breaks.
- "1 year old chicken"A yearling bird is tougher and more flavorful than a supermarket broiler. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken is the closest match; if you can find a stewing hen, use it and expect 60-90 minutes of simmering rather than 40.
- "Dress" and "cut up as directed"Dressing meant plucking, singeing and drawing the bird, which the store has done. Cut into eight or ten pieces: two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, breast halved, and the back reserved for the pot.
- Butter and flour, twice overThe listed tablespoon of butter and two tablespoons of flour cover the sauce. The dredging flour and browning butter are additional and unmeasured; allow about a half cup of flour and two to three tablespoons of butter for that stage.
- Reducing the stockOne pint is two cups. Forty minutes of simmering in water deep enough to cover the meat rarely reduces the liquid much, so boil it down after removing the chicken, and strain it before it goes into the roux.
- CreamPeriod 'cream' was unstandardised and varied in richness; heavy or whipping cream is a reasonable modern stand-in. Scalding it means bringing it just to steaming, not boiling.
- Toast pointsCrustless bread toasted and cut on the diagonal, set around the platter. They soak up sauce and are the whole of the starch in this dish unless you add rice or noodles.
- YieldServes four to six. The sauce does not reheat gracefully once the egg is in it, so make no more than you will serve.
Fricassee is a cooking term borrowed into English from French in the sixteenth century, for meat cut up and finished in its own sauce rather than roasted whole or boiled plain. The white version thickened with egg and cream has long been associated with American farmhouse cooking. Two details give it a period flavor: the assumption that the reader will dress her own bird, and the instruction to arrange the pieces "in something like the order in which they grow." Books like this one were published by flour millers and given away or sold cheaply; the repeated brand name in the ingredient list is the price of the recipe.